Research Computing in the Cloud

Research Computing - Cloud Use Cases

The public cloud brings a huge amount of flexibility to our research customers, giving you access to the latest technology, at practically any scale, as and only when you need it.

Public cloud providers offer:

• The latest hardware including GPU’s and CPUs
• High Performance Interconnects
• Pre-configured hosted solutions are available with OS’s and even specific application stacks including Machine Learning, Data Management, IoT etc pre-installed.
• Ability to right-size your environment for your requirement today

OCF have been involved in a number of research computing cloud projects including:

• Configuring an environment in GCP that gave each attendee access to a GPU workstation specification server, pre-configured with an imaging software stack for the length of a 3 day conference and ‘modelathon’. This solution included shared storage, a licensing server and on-site support for the length of the conference.
• Building a research computing cloud portal to give researchers an approved method of requesting Microsoft AZURE cloud resources using Red Hat Cloudforms. This solution gave the customer a limited catalogue of service offerings, an estimated maximum cost prior to requesting a service and an approval stream that enables budget holders to approve or deny a request for cloud resources.
• Demonstrating HPC Cloudburst using Slurm and AWS.

Request a call-back to discuss if your Research Computing workload is suitable for the public cloud