The NGS Cloud Infrastructure prototypes go on-line

NGS is conducting a two-year research and development project dedicated to Cloud Computing. The goal is to offer to NGS users private cloud infrastructures to conduct their research and to respond to the ever-evolving needs of NGS users.

Cloud Computing is rapidly emerging as an alternative platform for the computational and data needs of our community. NGS users are already using the Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) infrastructure for their research. In some situations, it is preferable for a NGS user to deploy a number of instances of a tailored Virtual Machine (VM) than submitting jobs to the existing NGS Grid Infrastructure.

The EC2 type of Cloud Computing, called 'Infrastructure as a Service' (IaaS) poses new challenges. Moving large quantities of data to privately own infrastructures, such as the Amazon one, can be substantially expensive or plainly impractical. At the same time, sensitive data, specifically those pertaining to projects that required ethical clearance, may not be exported, stored and elaborated outside the institutional or academic boundaries. A private Cloud Infrastructure managed by NGS, regulated by the same policies that have been endorsed for the NGS Grid Infrastructure, is an effective answer to such challenges.

At the moment, NGS offers its users two Cloud Infrastructure prototypes: one hosted at Oxford and one in Edinburgh. Users can request to be registered in one or both infrastructures and to use a default pool of pre-loaded, generic OS images or upload their own. From there, users will be able to run their own VMs, create virtual block storage devices, take snapshots, create security groups and much more. All this will be done by means of EC2 compatible commands or via an easy an intuitive web-base interface.

If you want to be an early adopter of the NGS private 'Clouds' prototypes please contact the NGS helpdesk.