CENIC, which operates the high performance network for California’s education and research communities, and PNWGP, which operates similar facilities in Washington, Alaska, Hawaii, Montana and Idaho, have established two 10 Gbps connections to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).
When a national network of ocean observatories begins streaming environmental sensor data in March 2012, researchers will be able to access storage and computing clouds operated by Amazon Web Services.
“The ability to use cost-effective cloud services to store and process large amounts of data is vital for researchers in many of the most active areas of research,” says CENIC President and CEO Jim Dolgonas. “Collaborative research is dependent on the ability to share, and seamlessly access and manipulate data. With these new peering connections to Amazon Web Services, both the CENIC and PNWGP communities can obtain maximum speed and benefit from AWS cloud services.”
Members of CENIC include the California K-12 system, all 114 campuses of California’s Community Colleges, all 23 campuses of the California State University, all 10 campuses of the University of California, and prestigious private universities including Caltech, USC, Stanford, and others. With this type of fiber-optic path connecting California’s research and educational institutions, data exchanges can take place in a fraction of a second — enabling research and collaboration previously within the realm of science fiction.
Among the first users to benefit from access to Amazon Web Services will be researchers participating in the National Science Foundation-funded Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) Cyberinfrastructure (CI) project. The University of California, San Diego is building the information technology and telecommunications infrastructure that will bring ocean and atmospheric sensor data from the observatories and make them available to environmental researchers around the country and throughout the world. Research teams in California will have the option to do their storage and computing on their own machines, or remotely on Amazon S3 or Amazon EC2.
Both UW and UC San Diego are involved in the $400 million Ocean Observatories Initiative, and its Cyberinfrastructure group — led by Scripps Institution of Oceanography and based in the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) — determined that cloud computing and remote storage would reduce the need for capital expenditures.
http://www.cenic.orghttp://www.calit2.net
