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Umbrella Software Environment Specification

Umbrella is a tool for specifying and materializing comprehensive execution environments, from the hardware all the way up to software and data. A user simply invokes Umbrella with the desired task, and Umbrella parses the specification, determines the minimum mechanism necessary to run the task, downloads missing dependencies, and executes the application through the available minimal mechanism, which may be direct execution, a system container (Parrot, Docker, chroot), a local virtual machine (i.e., VMware), or submission to a cloud environment (i.e., Amazon EC2) or grid environment (i.e., HTCondor).

An Umbrella specification includes six sections: hardware, kernel, os , software, data, and environ. By specifying the dependencies of an application clearly and materializing the execution environment during runtime automatically, the application becomes portable and reproducible.

Umbrella involves multiple sandboxing and virtualization techniques, however, the key idea of Umbrella is to construct a sandbox for an application during runtime by mounting all the os, software, and data dependencies into a virtual root filesystem without copying them. The usage of mounting mechanism allows multiple sandboxes share the same dependencies concurrently.

More Info

  • Download Umbrella
  • Umbrella User's Manual
  • Mailing List
  • Presentations

  • Conducting Reproducible Research with Umbrella: Tracking, Creating, and Preserving Execution Environments [Talk]. The IEEE 12th International Conference on eScience (IEEE eScience 2016), Baltimore, Maryland, October, 2016.
  • Conducting Reproducible Research with Umbrella: Tracking, Creating, and Preserving Execution Environments [Poster]. The IEEE 12th International Conference on eScience (IEEE eScience 2016), Baltimore, Maryland, October, 2016.
  • Techniques for Preserving Scientific Software Executions: Preserve the Mess or Encourage Cleanliness? [Talk]. 12th International Conference on Digital Preservation (iPres 2015), Chapel Hill, North Carolina, November, 2015.
  • Umbrella: A Portable Environment Creator for Reproducible Computing on Clusters, Clouds, and Grids [Talk]. 8th International Workshop on Virtualization Technologies in Distributed Computing (VTDC 2015) at HPDC, Portland, Oregon, June, 2015.
  • Umbrella: A Portable Environment Creator for Reproducible Computing on Clusters, Clouds, and Grids [Poster]. 4th Greater Chicago Area Systems Research Workshop (GCASR) 2015 , Chicago, Illinois, April, 2015.
  • Publications

    (Showing papers with tag umbrella. See all papers instead.)