With all of the latest technologies available on-demand in the public cloud, there has never been a better time to consider the benefits of the public cloud for research computing. To help facilitate this, we recently announced our partnership with RONIN, a software product designed from the ground up to help organisations adopt AWS in a research computing setting.
With this new partnership we have an answer to the main challenges hindering adoption to public cloud, including user and cost management, giving an easy to use interface that will allow our customers to be able to seriously start taking advantage of the public cloud for research at an institutional level.
In the future, I see institutions using the public cloud as another resource that a central research computing department can share with its user community. This will allow HPC and Research Computing users to have the self-service capabilities they desire, along with the oversight and control required by the organisation – a win-win for both users and the administrators of these central services.
Previously, if a research computing user chose to self-manage their own public cloud environments users are often thrust into roles such as system administrator, network engineer and storage manager in order to enter the world of cloud computing and e-research. By instead using RONIN’s software to manage this research cloud infrastructure, researchers are able to spin-up environments as needed for short term requirements or assess the usefulness of advancements in co-processors or software frameworks without the onus of large capital expenditure or long lead times. A maximum cost of their planned usage can be estimated and approved, and machines even automatically set to turn on and off in-line with users working hours. Accessing AWS through RONIN can also be a great way for organisations to take their first steps in AI and machine learning, giving them easy access to the latest GPU technology only when the need it.
The public cloud is already being used to augment on-premises resources by individuals and groups in many institutions, what RONIN really brings is a way of managing the public cloud as a central resource, giving researchers the freedom to spin-up resources in a simple repeatable manner, compliant with an institution’s policies and safe in the knowledge they won’t get a bill any larger than they are expecting.
Both OCF and RONIN are members of the AWS Partner Network (APN).
If you’d like to find out more about how OCF and RONIN can help you with the adoption of the public cloud for research computing, please get in touch here.