Managing Appliance Launches in Infrastructure Clouds Authors: John Bresnahan (Argonne National Laboratory), Tim Freeman (University of Chicago), David Labissoniere (University of Chicago), Kate Keahey (Argonne National Laboratory) Time: 2:45pm - 5:15pm Abstract: Infrastructure cloud computing introduces a significant paradigm shift that has the potential to revolutionize how scientific computing is done. However, while it is actively adopted by a number of scientific communities, it is still lacking a well-developed and mature ecosystem that will allow the scientific community to better leverage the capabilities it offers. This paper introduces a specific addition to the infrastructure cloud ecosystem: the cloudinit.d program, a tool for launching, configuring, monitoring, and repairing a set of interdependent virtual machines in an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud or over a set of IaaS clouds. The cloudinit.d program was developed in the context of the Ocean Observatory Initiative (OOI) project to help it launch and maintain complex virtual platforms provisioned on-demand on top of infrastructure clouds. Like the UNIX init.d program, cloudinit.d can launch specified groups of services, and the VMs in which they run, at different run levels representing dependencies of the launched VMs. Once launched, cloudinit.d monitors the health of each running service to ensure that the overall application is operating properly. If a problem is detected in a service cloudinit.d will restart only that service, and any other service that failed which depended upon it.