Building a medical research cloud in the EASI-CLOUDS project

The demand for IT resources is constantly growing in the scientific area. The ability to store and process increasing amounts of data has transformed many research disciplines, like the life-sciences, which now rely on complex data processing and data analytics. Cloud environments are able to integrate and encapsulate possibly distributed resources and allow convenient and on-demand access to the corresponding services, tools, and complete work environments. The European research project EASI-CLOUDS (http://www. easi-clouds.eu) develops a platform for a convenient service delivery with special regard to service integration, monitoring, management, and Service Level Agreement (SLA) negotiation and with the option to federate cloud resources between multiple installations. In order to demonstrate the capabilities a use-case for a medical service cloud has been developed in close partnership with the Charité university hospital which has a high demand on computing resources for the research in MRI related diagnostics of brain diseases. This use-case serves as the basis for the development of clouds for medical research in particular.