Visible to the public Appendix: The VO Architecture

Submitted by admin on Wed, 01/16/2013 - 5:47pm

The Computing Infrastructure

The server powering the CPS-VO deployment is currently a Dell PowerEdge r515:

  • 2 x 2.1ghz 4170HE AMD Opteron w/6 cores per, for 12 cores
  • 64GB of memory
  • 6.38TB of usable storage, configured as a RAID5 array
  • 6 x gigabit network interfaces
  • protected by a Vanderbilt ITS firewall service (2 x Checkpoint 4600 configured as a HA pair)
  • backed up to an LTO tape using the ISIS/Vanderbilt backup service

This server hosts 4 Virtual Machines:

  1. The Development Machine
    where various new features and bug fixes are initially integrated together in an environment that is similar to the actual CPS-VO installation
    (2 vCPU, 8GB memory, 96GB storage)
  2. The Staging Machine
    used for final testing before deploying new code; this is an exact replica of the actual CPS-VO
    (6 vCPU, 16GB memory, 532GB storage)
  3. The Production Machine
    where http://cps-vo.org actually lives; this is the live site
    (6 vCPU, 16GB memory, 532GB storage)
  4. The Big Blue Button Server
    hosts the VO's open-source web conferencing system (e.g. desktop sharing, video & voice over ip)
    (2 vCPU, 4GB memory, 80GB storage)

The Virtual Organization Software Stack:

The software architecture of the VO comprises a large suite of open-source technologies.

In the following sections, we progressively walk through an overview of each of the layers, proceeding from the lowest systems level software, to the upper application-specific codes.