Internet2 announced a new partnership with the National Science Foundation (NSF) to coordinate the use of commercial cloud platforms for scientific computing research needs.
Internet2 will serve as the coordinator, facilitator and administrator of the Exploring Clouds for Acceleration of Science (E-CAS) project, which will investigate the viability of commercial clouds as an option for leading-edge research computing and computational science supporting a range of academic disciplines.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud are named as the initial providers supporting the project.
Proposals will be selected from two categories:
- Time-to-science: to achieve the best time-to-solution for scientific application and workflows that may be time or situation sensitive; and
- Innovation: to explore innovative use of heterogeneous hardware resources, serverless applications and/or machine learning to support and extend application workflows.
“We are very excited to partner with NSF and work in collaboration with leading cloud providers to support a broad spectrum of scientific disciplines and help provide digital research platforms to a wider range of scientific endeavors,” said Howard Pfeffer, president and CEO of Internet2, and principal investigator on the E-CAS project. “For over 20 years, Internet2 has served to connect researchers who work together to solve common technology challenges, and to develop innovative solutions in support of their educational, research, and community service missions. This partnership is an extension of our commitment to supporting researchers and diversifying technology solutions for the benefit of the research and education community.”
“Since its inception, Google Cloud has been advancing state-of-the-art modern computing infrastructures, and today’s scientific computing infrastructure provides a vast set of resources for researchers to leverage,” said Kevin Kells, Director of Google for Education. “In this partnership with Internet2 and the National Science Foundation, we are encouraging the research community to accelerate scientific discovery by developing innovative applications that harness the global-scale services provided by Google Cloud.”
