Abstract

In recent years, cloud computing has been adopted in many industrial and academic environments, as a way to improve the efficiency of the individual execution times by sharing resources on servers with higher compute and storage capacity. The platform used in this work follows the Virtual Laboratory systems of CSIRO, supported by NeCTAR which is a research cloud computing system based on OpenStack which offer up to 32000 cores. It can be accessed through a user friendly scientific workflow platform providing geoscientists with an integrated environment that exploits e-Research tools and cloud computing technologies. Using the Virtual Geophysical Laboratory (VGL) as the main concept, the objective is to provide a system that allows researchers to collaborate and execute processes concerning geometallurgical applications on a web environment, taking advantage of the cloud infrastructure provided by NeCTAR. This system is called Abeja Virtual Geometallurgy Laboratory (Abeja VGML). Abeja was built to support task management, which includes the setup of virtual machines on demand, remote execution of geometallurgical analysis scripts, fault tolerance features and task workflow support. The system consists of a main server, which is configured as an entry point to receive all task requests. A front-end works as a web application, allowing authenticated users to choose the hardware resources, script parameters, files upload/download files, task execution control, creation of pipelines to run chained geometallurgical processes and to receive real-time notifications and callbacks through a dedicated channel. As a result, the platform has been used as a collaborative tool allowing both CSIRO and University of Chile researchers to develop cloud computing ready applications, allowing to solve complex task workflows through a user friendly and modern web based interface.