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CESGA Delivers Supercomputing On-Demand

  • The software developed in the European project SmartLM improves safety for the new “Pay-per-Use” systems on the Cloud.
  • Components of the Accounting and Billing Portal made by CESGA are available on open source for the benefit of the research community.

Galicia Supercomputing Centre, CESGA, has signed a technology transfer agreement with leading IT corporations. The prototype, which will be marketed under the name of elasticLM, is the final result of the SmartLM Project, funded by the Seventh Framework Program of the European Union. It aims to develop mechanisms for management and use of software licenses more efficiently and flexible. The result is expected to have a major impact on companies and institutions since the new and more affordable license models will allow reducing investment, increasing thus its competitiveness.Finisterrae

Up to eleven institutions and companies from Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain, United Kingdom and Sweden participated in the project. After the agreement, the owners of SmartLM prototype and of its later development and commercialization will be: ATOS ORIGIN, an international information technology services company, GRIDCORE, a system integrator specialized in High Performance Computing, and the Fraunhofer Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing (SCAI), the leading organization of institutes of applied research and development in Europe.

SOFTWARE LICENSES FOR CLOUD
The prototype developed with CESGA collaboration is an open solution for software licenses management, “the first system based on open standards that allows the elastic and distributed management of these licenses”, according to Andrés Gómez Tato, responsible for CESGA Applications and Projects.

Current software license models are not flexible enough to support commercial applications that may need access to remote resources. Besides, within the new paradigm of virtual services, it is very expensive buy software licenses for each CPU of the infrastructure. Nevertheless, SmartLM licenses can be used in local cluster environments with no problem, as well as in Grid or Cloud environments, local or remote, private and public, and under the particular circumstances of the Service-Oriented Architectures.

According to Gómez Tato, “it is a system meant for similar use to the others that are starting to appear in the market at the moment. What makes our system different is that the user can execute that software licensed for his institution at other institution. It is meant to be totally operative in the new Cloud paradigm”. The Cloud market is an expanding sector and expected to grow between 23% and 68% until 2012, according to different sources.

EXCLUSIVE INNOVATIONS
SmartLM includes other innovative characteristics such as improved safety according to current needs of applications protected by licenses, advanced mechanisms of authentication and authorization for software access in Grid environments and the automated Accounting and Billing interface, developed at CESGA, 100% trustworthy. That allows an easy adoption of advanced business models such as Pay-per-Use on Grid and Cloud, and makes it suitable for sectors such as Pharmaceutical, Finances or Entertainment.

OPEN SOURCE RELEASE
The nature of the software developed makes necessary to protect most of its components in order to avoid attacks to its security mechanisms. However, for the benefit for the research community, SmartLM Consortium decided to release a number of components under open source license (BSD license) available at:

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