April 10, 2018, by Jim Wilson

Cloud Computing for Research

Recently more and more services are moving towards the cloud, it’s a relentless march and one that we can’t and shouldn’t ignore. My work and personal email accounts are now entirely cloud based, at home we download TV programs and films from the cloud and while I write this blog I’m listening to some music streamed from an Amazon Datacentre over the internet to my laptop.

So, it looks like everything is moving more towards a cloud based service, but what about research computing, can that (and should that) take place in the cloud too, and what are the implications for the University’s research community?

In this blog series we will explore some of the aspects of cloud computing that could have an impact on research that uses compute. We’ll examine some of the available tools and platforms and have a look at what it is that they each offer, what the benefits and pit falls are and when various tools are most suitable.

We’ll have a more detailed look at the big commercial offerings from the likes of Amazon (AWS), Microsoft (Azure) and Google (Google Cloud Platform). But we’ll also look at some of the smaller more interesting offerings from the likes of rescale. Most importantly we’ll test some of these service against each other to probe which offer the greatest benefits to researcher.

Featured image: Cloud Computing by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 ImageCreator

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