The document discusses a presentation on cloud computing for research and education. It covers current usage of cloud services, barriers to adoption, and the different types of cloud services. It also discusses the financial benefits of cloud computing, using cloud services for collaboration and capacity needs, and scenarios that are well-suited for cloud deployment. Building a private research cloud is presented as a way to address trust issues. The role of national research and education networks and potential federation of national clouds in Europe is also mentioned.

1. 18 May 2011
TNC2011
Terena Prague
Dr Malcolm Read
JISC Executive Secretary
Chair of e-infraNet Steering Committee
18/05/2011 | Slide 1

2. Current Picture
Usage
 Mostly SaaS to date: e-Mail, followed by storage, web services
and virtual learning environments. Some use of other levels of
stack
Reason for uptake
 Provision of a better service, followed by a reduction in costs,
better collaboration and a reduction of hardware overheads as
part of a green IT strategy
Barriers to uptake
 Jurisdiction issues, uptime of services, security of services, lock-
in and the strength of service level agreements
 Real costs of research computing currently hidden from most
users so Cloud can look expensive
18/05/2011 | Slide 2

3. Which bit of the Cloud?
Every level of the ‘stack’ is catered for – which is right for you?
 Software as a Service (SaaS)
Diagram credit: www.saasblogs.com
– eg, Google Apps, Microsoft 365
 Platform as a Service (PaaS)
– eg, MS Azure, Google App Engine
 Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
– ie, compute, storage, database
– eg, Amazon Web Services, Vmware
vCloud, Eucalyptus
 Do we need to add in Middleware as a Service (MaaS)
– Offerings like Cassandra or Amazon Elastic Map Reduce
18/052011 | Slide 3

4. Why Invest in Cloud Computing?
 Efficient, cost effective infrastructure
– provides access to industrial scale economies in deployment and
use of infrastructure and applications
– leads to financial benefits and in turn carbon and other
environmental benefits
 Potential to cope with sudden peak demands for increased
storage and compute requirements
 Provides a suitable ‘neutral platform’ for HEI / business
collaboration.
 Lowers barriers to participation in high end computing – “e-
Science for the Masses”
05/07/2011 | Slide 4

5. Financial Cost
Large data centres can use economies of scale to be
significantly cheaper and can be flexible in delivering layers
of a standardised, modularised service
 Particularly attractive to smaller institutions without the capital
budget for wholesale rip and replace that are able to secure
access to upgraded infrastructure which they could not
otherwise afford
 NB Requires changes in culture – specifically expectations of
‘fine-tuning’ of services to meet specific requirements
 For example, the European Space Agency is utilizing Amazon
EC2 for the data-processing needs of its Gaia mission. The
40Gb per night that Gaia will generate would have cost $1.5
million using local resources but research suggests it could
cost in the $500,000 range using EC2
05/07/2011 | Slide 5

6. Capacity
Having more storage and compute available on demand is
very useful for dealing with sudden peak usage and projects
that on occasion need to crunch larger data
 Examples
– Flood simulation at Newcastle University
– Machine Learning Group at the University of Cambridge used
Amazon’s Elastic Map Reduce to process data sets that would
have taken weeks to do locally
– ApatMEMS-ID developing means of distinguishing different
strains of MSRA. Cloud is used as “cloudburst” to supplement
local Condor grid
05/07/2011 | Slide 6

7. Collaboration
Using Cloud can make it easier to collaborate with
businesses
 For instance, if a spin-off company should come out of a
project that uses web resources it may be easier to hand over
control to something run on a virtual machine
 Similarly, for partnerships with industry using an external cloud
provider can make it easier to collaborate as both HEIs and
industry often restrict external access to their systems
 Services like e-Science Central1, a ‘Science-as-a-Service’
platform that combines Software-as-a-Service, social
networking, and “cloud” computing remove the need to
maintain one’s own systems whilst still offering control over
what, when and with whom to share data
1 www.esciencecentral.co.uk
05/07/2011 | Slide 7

8. What should we look to use the Cloud for?
 Good candidate scenarios for Cloud deployment that JISC has
identified include those with one or more of the following
characteristics:
– Short timescale requirements
– Infrequent use and/or no desire to maintain infrastructure
– Dynamic scalability to larger capacity (‘cloudbursting’)
– Transfer to commercial use
– Flexibility with system configuration and/or frozen system
configuration
– Data hosting and backup
– Cloud-based research publications
– Ad hoc activities in support of research
05/07/2011 | Slide 8

9. Why build a private Cloud?
The key word here is trust. Researchers and HE staff need to
be able to trust the reliability and integrity of the cloud they
use as well as sustainability of data and overall reliability
 There are four critical enabling factors of Cloud Computing:
– virtualisation and automation
– pay per user software
– data centres
– broadband connectivity
 There's no reason though why the research and HE Cloud
can't be built from commercial components
 However the Cloud itself and the HEI’s connections to it must
be as safe and reliable as the physical IT hardware it is
replacing otherwise the benefits are meaningless 05/07/2011 | Slide 9

10. Role for NRENs
 NRENs are obvious candidates for brokering and delivering
private cloud services, exploiting their procurement and service
delivery expertise.
 Security (e.g. access management) is also usually managed by the
NREN.
05/07/2011 | Slide 10

11. Federation of NRECs?
 If and when countries build National Research and Education
(private) Clouds there is value in exploiting economies of scale at
the European level.
 Clear parallel with NRENs and GEANT
05/07/2011 | Slide 11

12. Relevant UK studies
 Using Cloud Computing for Research1 study
 Report from workshop on Cloud Computing2
 Currently 11 pilot projects funded by JISC and EPSRC3
1 www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/researchinfrastructure/usingcloudcomp.aspx
2 www.rcuk.ac.uk/documents/research/esci/CloudWorkshopJuly2010.pdf
3 cloudresearch.jiscinvolve.org
05/07/2011 | Slide 12