18 Int. J. Big Data Intelligence, Vol. 1, Nos. 1/2, 2014 Designing and implementing a cloud-hosted SaaS for data movement and sharing with SlapOS Walid Saad*, Heithem Abbes and Mohamed Jemni LaTICE, Universit´ e de Tunis, ESSTT 5, Av. Taha Hussein, B.P. 56, Bab Mnara,Tunis, Tunisia E-mail: walid.saad@lipn.univ-paris13.fr E-mail: heithem.abbes@lipn.univ-paris13.fr, E-mail: mohamed.jemni@fst.rnu.tn *Corresponding author Christophe C ´ erin LIPN/CNRS UMR 7030, Universit´ e de Paris 13, 99, Avenue Jean-Baptiste Cl´ ement, 93430 Villetaneuse, France E-mail: christophe.cerin@lipn.univ-paris13.fr Abstract: For over a decade, the data requirements of e-Science applications increase drastically with the emergence of data-intensive applications. Several tools and frameworks have been developed to manage and handle the big amount of data for the grid platforms. However, the use of these tools by the basic scientist and the grid computing community is not well adopted because of the complexity of the installation and configuration processes. Recently, an open source distributed operating system for clouds emerged, namely SlapOS. The aim of SlapOS is to hide the complexity of IT infrastructures and software deployments from users. In this work, we propose a cloud-hosted data grid using the SlapOS cloud. Through a software as a service (SaaS) solution, users can request and install automatically any data movement and sharing tools like Stork and Bitdew without any intervention of a system administrator. The entire solution is now running in production into the SlapOS cloud at Paris 13 University. Intensive experiments have been conducted on the Grid ‘5000 testbed to validate our approach. Keywords: data-intensive application; big data management; software as a service; SaaS; stork; Bitdew; SlapOS; grids tools and clouds federation ; software integration. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Saad, W., Abbes, H., Jemni, M. and C´ erin, C. (2014) ‘Designing and implementing a cloud-hosted SaaS for data movement and sharing with SlapOS’, Int. J. Big Data Intelligence, Vol. 1, Nos. 1/2, pp.18–35. Biographical notes: Walid Saad is currently a Teaching Assistant in Computer Science at Higher Institute of Business Administration of Gafsa, University of Gafsa, Tunisia. He received his Master degree in Computer Science in 2009 from the Higher School of Sciences and Techniques of Tunis, University of Tunis, Tunisia. He is a member of Research Laboratory of Technologies of Information and Communication and Electrical Engineering (LaTICE) at the University of Tunis. Since 2010, he has been working towards his PhD at the Research Laboratory LaTICE in Tunisia in collaboration with the LIPN Laboratory in France. His research is focused on grid computing, peer-to-peer systems and cloud computing. Heithem Abbes received his PhD in Computer Sciences, from the University of Paris 13 and ENSI (University of Manouba) in 2009. Since 2010, he has been an Associate Professor in Computer Science Department at the Faculty of Sciences of Tunis. He is a member of Research Laboratory of Technologies of Information and Communication and Electrical Engineering (LaTICE) at the University of Tunis. He has been working on high performance computing, grid computing and cloud computing research fields. Copyright © 2014 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.