Dr Steven Manos1, Dr Rhys Francis1, Carmel Walsh2, Paul Coddington2, Shubhra Dargar2
1Australian Biocommons, Melbourne, Australia, 2Australian Research Data Commons, Melbourne, Australia
This BoF aims to kick-start a national community conversation on experiences with commercial cloud. Nationally, there has been an increase in commercial cloud at the level of institutions, as well as NCRIS capabilities in life sciences, ecology and marine sciences. This follows significant international presences on AWS, Azure and Google by institutions such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH, USA) and the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI, UK/EU).
Explorations to date highlight that the properties of on-prem infrastructure and the properties of commercial cloud are significantly different. Those differences should mean that research can benefit from the proper utilisation of both. However, the scarcity of long running experience with commercial cloud contrasts poorly with the extent of our knowledge of, and comfort with, on-prem. It is vital that those of us in eResearch roles grow our understanding of the benefits possible from the proper utilisation of commercial cloud. It is already clear that research practice both here and overseas will inevitably adopt commercial cloud capabilities.
The session will bring together various projects, activities, NCRIS initiatives engaging commercial cloud, to summarise their experiences, and is open to all parties wanting to explore the rationale and research enabling benefits possible from the use of commercial cloud. Importantly, the Bof is concerned with the addition of commercial cloud capabilities to the infrastructure supporting Australian research and not the replacement of any existing capabilities.
Biography:
Dr. Steven Manos heads up cyberinfrastructure at a national scale through the Australian BioCommons, working towards building a national policy and infrastructure landscape which strongly supports data intensive life sciences research.
Rhys has contributed to Australian eResearch through many activities including developing the initial investment plan in eResearch for the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy; proposing the eResearch investments in the scale up created by the Super Science Initiative and serving as the Executive Director of the Australian eResearch Infrastructure Council for seven years. Since retiring he has developed a revised eResearch Framework for government, assisted the University of Melbourne develop its Petascale Campus Initiative and facilitated the Research Data Culture Conversation among research intensive universities. Today Rhys has returned to work as part of the team developing the Australian BioCommons.