Cloud Computing for the UK Research Community

28 Nov 2013, 13:00 → 29 Nov 2013, 13:30 Europe/London

Mendel Rooms 1 and 2 (Francis Crick Institute)

Philip Kershaw (STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory)

Cloud Computing is bringing about significant shifts in the way data and computing resources are managed and provisioned. It has the potential to transform the way research is conducted but equally there are significant challenges to be addressed for its successful adoption for any given use case. The focus of this workshop is the application of Cloud Computing in the context of the UK research community. Through bringing together stakeholders and interested parties from a range of research disciplines and from industry, we are seeking to identify common requirements, particular problem areas which need to be addressed and examples of best practice. The workshop has been organised by the UK Cloud Computing Special Interest Group, a group established to foster collaboration and establish best practice for the application of Cloud Computing in the UK research community. This group has membership drawn from a range of research domains, from infrastructure providers and representatives from industry who are actively involved in the technical application of cloud technologies.

notes list_of_hotels_near_ucl.pdf

Thursday 28 November

12:00 Lunch at the Parcel Yard

Eduserv has kindly sponsored a lunch for everyone tomorrow (Thursday 28th) from 12.00 - 14.00 at the Parcel Yard at Kings Cross in London, N1 9AL

http://www.parcelyard.co.uk/findus

This is about 15 mins walk along Euston Rd. from the Wellcome Building.

A hot buffet will be available to everyone from 12.30.

1 Workshop Introduction

* Welcome to the Crick Institute from Alison Davis (ICT Director) * Introduction to the workshop, Philip Kershaw

Speaker: Philip Kershaw (STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory)

Matching Public Clouds to the Needs of the Research Community

Convener: David Blundell (100 Percent IT)

2 Windows Azure for Research

Windows Azure is an open and flexible global cloud platform supporting any language, tool, or framework, and is ideally suited to researchers’ needs across disciplines. The Windows Azure for Research program provides researchers with a variety of tools and resources to help them use Windows Azure to access the power of cloud computing for on-demand computation, collaboration, and data-intensive processing. Participants have the opportunity to respond to requests for proposals for Windows Azure awards and access training and technical resources. For more details see www.azaure4research.com

Speaker: Dr Kenji Takeda (Microsoft Research)

Slides Windows Azure for Research

3 Confessions of a Cloud Builder

An open and frank recount of the challenges faced by Cloud providers in meeting the varied requirements of Cloud consumers, from the technical challenges through to the operational alignments with clients from different market sectors and how with the latest technologies can solve many of the issues that existed with Cloud 1.0.

Speaker: Adam Ryan (Q Associates)

15:15 Break

4 Research Computing on Amazon Web Services

In this session I'll describe some of the building block services available through AWS that can be leveraged to enable greater agility and speed in delivery of Research outcomes.

Speaker: Chris Hayman (Amazon Web Services)

Slides Research_Computing_on_AWS.pdf

5 Cloudy with a Chance of Rootkits - Assurance Requirements for e-Infrastructure Services

The Higher Education sector has recently benefited from substantial government investment in e-Infrastructure services for use by research and industry, such as the regional supercomputing centres. This talk will look at the steps the sector needs to take to create trustworthy services that our R&D partners in industry will be happy to use, drawing upon Martin's experience running the HPC Midlands supercomputer centre. Subject matter will range from legal and contractual underpinnings to practical technical steps around information assurance.

Speaker: Martin Hamilton (University of Loughborough)

Slides http://www.slideshare.net/comth/cloudy-with-a-chance-of-rootkits-assurance-requirements-for-einfrastructure-services#

6 Discussion

Discussion following from the presentations and an introduction to the Cloud-SIG and its objectives

Slides Cloud-SIG_Introduction.pdf Cloud-SIG_Introduction.pptx

19:15 Workshop Dinner

Friday 29 November

Cloud Federation and Brokering

7 The EGI Federated Cloud, using standards to create a fair and open European Cloud marketplace

The EGI Federate cloud has been active for two years, within that time it has moved from an idea on how using standards you can build a federation of private and smaller public cloud providers to an activity that is currently connecting national cloud services within three countries alongside smaller clouds from elsewhere. It has also bought the EGI its first commercial resource provider which we use as a showcase of how with the creation of an open marketplace different classes of providers, business models and SLA are able to be supported to provide resources to different communities with different expectations.

Speaker: Dr David Wallom (Oxford e-Research Centre)

Slides 13-11-29-Wallom-EGI_Fedcloud.pdf EGI Federated Cloud

8 Janet Cloud Services

Speaker: John Milner (JANET)

Slides Janet Cloud Services Janet_STFC_v0.1.pdf

9 Helix Nebula, the Science Cloud

Helix Nebula, the Science Cloud initiative is a Partnership between big science and big business to implement the Strategic Plan for a Scientific Cloud Computing Infrastructure in Europe. The presentation is about HN objective, strategic plan, final goal and the present implementation status.

Speaker: Dr Francesco Casu (CNR)

10:30 Break

Private Cloud Deployment

Convener: Dr David Fergusson (Francis Crick Institute)

10 Virtualisation and Cloud Computing at EBI

The European Bioinformatics Institute (part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory) runs four data centres that supports the production of diverse genomic databases and delivers these databases through its web interfaces to over 3M unique visitors each year. The presentation will provide an overview of how virtualisation is used to manage the data centres and this technology is now being used to provide a cloud infrastructure to its collaborators.

Speaker: Steven Newhouse (EMBL-EBI)

Slides EBIEmbassyCloud-CrickNov2013d.pdf Virtualisation and Cloud Computing at EBI

11 Software Defined Research Computing

The presentation will focus on the enhancement that VMware technology can bring to high performance computing through pooling of resources, proactive management, automation and consumerisation of IT assets.

Speaker: Arash Ghazanfari (VMware)

12 CERN Private OpenStack Cloud

CERN IT is providing an OpenStack private cloud for its experiments as well as for individual users. Since Summer 2013, the service is in production, and we are growing it rapidly. We will present details about our cloud use cases, the production deployment and an outlook for 2014.

Speaker: Jan van Eldik (CERN)

Slides 20131129_-_CERN_private_OpenStack_Cloud_-_London.pdf

Final Discussion and Agree Next steps

Convener: Philip Kershaw (STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory)