Gateway Hosting at Indiana University

Abstract

The gateway hosting service at Indiana University provides science gateways and portals with hosting resources to facilitate the use of computation resources and storage within the TeraGrid. This service is designed with high availability in mind and is deployed across the Indianapolis and Bloomington campuses with redundant network, power, and storage. The service uses OpenVZ to give each gateway or portal its own virtual environment while making the most efficient use of the hardware and administrative resources. OpenVZ’s user beancounter quota system and fair-share scheduling for processes and I/O allows fair distribution of resource between virtual machines while allowing full utilization of the hardware. The ability to do live migration allows kernel updates without service interruption. Indiana University’s research network provides multiple low latency high bandwidth connections between campuses, other TeraGrid resource providers, and the Internet at large. The service is in use by a variety of projects such as FlyBase and TeraGrid Information Services and, since the service was put into production in August 2008, there have been 5.37 hours of down time.