About IM
========

Cloud infrastructures are becoming an appropriate solution to address the
computational needs of scientific applications. However, the use of public or
on-premises Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds require users to have
non-trivial system administration skills.

For that, IM is a **tool that ease the access and the usability of IaaS
clouds** by automating the VMI selection, deployment, configuration, software
installation, monitoring and update of Virtual Appliances. **It supports APIs
from a large number of virtual platforms**, making user applications
cloud-agnostic. In addition **it integrates a contextualization system** to
enable the installation and configuration of all the user required applications
providing the user with a fully functional infrastructure.

It is a service that features a **web-based GUI, a XML-RPC API, a REST API and
a command-line application**.

IM has been developed by the `Grid and High Performance Computing Group (GRyCAP) <http://www.grycap.upv.es>`_ at 
the `Instituto de Instrumentación para Imagen Molecular (I3M) <http://www.i3m.upv.es>`_ 
from the `Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) <http://www.upv.es>`_.

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The following publications summarise both the development and integration in larger architecture. Please acknowledge the usage of this software by citing the first reference:

* Caballer, M.; Blanquer, I.; Moltó, G.; and de Alfonso, C.; **"Dynamic management of virtual infrastructures"** . Journal of Grid Computing, Volume 13, Issue 1, Pages 53-70, 2015, ISSN 1570-7873, 10.1007/s10723-014-9296-5.
* Caballer, M.; Moltó, G.; Calatrava, A.; and de Blanquer, I.; **"Infrastructure Manager: A TOSCA-Based Orchestrator for the Computing Continuum"** . Journal of Grid Computing, Volume 21, Issue 3, 2023, ISSN 1570-7873, 10.1007/s10723-023-09686-7.
* Caballer, M.; de Alfonso, C.; Moltó, G.; Romero, E.; Blanquer, I.; and García, A.; **"CodeCloud: A Platform to Enable Execution of Programming Models on the Clouds"** . Journal of Systems and Software, Volume 93, Pages 187-198, 2014, ISSN 0164-1212, 10.1016/j.jss.2014.02.005
* Caballer, M., Segrelles, D., Moltó, G. and Blanquer, I.  **"A Platform to Deploy Customized Scientific Virtual Infrastructures on the Cloud"** . Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, Volume 27, Issue 16, Pages 4318-4329, 2015, ISSN 1532-0626, 10.1002/cpe.3518.
* Caballer, M.; de Alfonso, C.; Alvarruiz, F. and Moltó, G.; **"EC3: Elastic Cloud Computing Cluster"** . Journal of Computer and System Sciences, Volume 78, Issue 8, December 2013, Pages 1341-1351, ISSN 0022-0000, 10.1016/j.jcss.2013.06.005.
* Segrelles, D.; Moltó, G. and Caballer, Miguel. **"Remote Computational Labs for Educational Activities via a Cloud Computing Platform"** . In 2015 Proceedings of the Information Systems Education Conference (ISECON 2015), pp. 309–21, 2015.  **[Best Paper Award]**
* de Alfonso, C.; Caballer, M.; Alvarruiz, F.; Moltó, G.; and Hernández, V.; **"Infrastructure Deployment over the Cloud"** . In 3rd IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science (CloudCom 2011), pp. 517 - 521, 2011, 10.1109/CloudCom.2011.77.
* Caballer, M.; Segrelles, D.; Moltó, G.; and Blanquer, I.; **"A platform to deploy customized scientific virtual infrastructures on the cloud"** . Concurrency Computation: Practice and Experience, 2015, ISSN 1532-0634, 10.1002/cpe.3518.
* Moltó, G. and Caballer, M.  **"On Using the Cloud to Support Online Courses"** . In 2014 Frontiers in Education Conference., 2014. 10.1109/FIE.2014.7044041.
* **"Custom elastic clusters to manage Galaxy environments"**. In: EGI Inspired Newsletter (Issue 22), pp 2, January 2016. Available `here <http://www.egi.eu/news-and-media/newsletters/Inspired_Issue_22/Custom_elastic_clusters_to_manage_Galaxy_environments.html>`_.