This talk will be presented by Wayne Gilmore, Director, Research Computing Services, Boston University, and Emre Keskin, University Research Data Officer, Harvard University
Talk Title: The Building Blocks of Cloud – Research Enablement
Talk Abstract: In the past 20 years, within higher-ed, we have focused our efforts on High-Performance Computing and tailored our support to numerical modeling and simulations that have grown out of science and engineering enterprise. However, since then, the digital nature of research has impacted every discipline, and data is now the first class citizen. AI can now exploit this mountain of data to accelerate discovery in a way not possible just 2-3 years ago. With that, the tools and infrastructure needs have changed, and our research computing groups are at an impasse to create new tools and provide new support structures to our researchers.
Cloud computing provides all the necessary building blocks to support modern data-driven discovery. Modern research has become more sophisticated, needing multi-mode computing and data needs, shifting away from the monolith batch processing HPC, where parallelization is tightly coupled. A typical cloud example includes an interactive web interface connected to database backends and more complex task scheduling with a mixture of long-running control processes bursting out to a loose network of short-running tasks pulling data from an object store. While commercial cloud providers have built vast ecosystems of tools and infrastructure options, this abstraction has become quite opaque for the lay researcher; it is overwhelming, ascertaining costs is difficult, and debugging performance issues is a black box. So with our decades of HPC operational knowledge and the growing need for cloud infrastructure, we have built the Northeast Storage Exchange and New England Research Cloud, tailored to our higher-ed needs. This has now given us the opportunity to support new domains of research on campus and support an ecosystem of tools and software that bring computing and data together. In this talk, I’ll provide an overview of our challenges and a vision of where this could take us in support of our university research mission.