West-Life: Second deployment of the consolidated Platform

Development of automated portal setup and operation via cloud orchestration services continued. We followed the directions outlined in D4.1, using Cloudify as the primary tool. We use the deployment of Gromacs portal [4] as the showcase, which demonstrates all the supported features, and where the primary documentation and usage guidelines are maintained. Besides numerous minor improvements and bug fixes, two principal features were added:  Support for GPU: the templates may request GPU enabled cloud machines via OCCI at sites where this functionality is supported. Appropriate vendor (NVIDIA™) kernel drivers and libraries are installed, both CUDA and accelerated OpenGL remote rendering is available.  Deployment via Cloudify Manager: unlike "one shot" deployment with Cloudify CLI, Cloudify Manager is a permanently running service which monitors the whole deployment and can react to various events (e.g. a node is restarted automatically when it dies). Also the deployment (e.g. number of worker nodes) can grow or shrink dynamically. Alternate approach using solutions of H2020 INDIGO-DataCloud project was tested as well. Unfortunately, these project products appear not to be mature enough to be usable without extensive support of the INDIGO team. Therefore this direction of development in West-life was abandoned for the time being.