Human in the Loop Virtual Machine Management on Comet

The Comet petascale system is an XSEDE resource with the goal of serving a large user community. The Comet project has served a large number of users while using traditional supercomputing as well as science gateways. In addition to these offerings, Comet also includes a non traditional virtual machine framework that allows users to access entire Virtual Clusters instead of just focusing on individual virtual machines. The virtual machine framework integrates a custom administration interface, a novel virtual machine image management back-end, industry standard hardware virtualization technology and leverages the Comet resource manager and job scheduler to provide access to Comet compute nodes. However, to access and manage it user input is required. In this paper, we summarize the efforts of human in the loop-for-cloud require as part of the computing activities on comet. This includes a discussion of how to get access, how to use the system, how to obtain support and what lessons we learned form the operation of this facility for users.