Exploring Clouds for Acceleration of Science (E-CAS)

Internet2, Washington DC

Investigators

Abstract

Internet2 leads the "Exploring Clouds for Acceleration of Science (E-CAS)" project in partnership with representative commercial cloud providers to accelerate scientific discoveries. The effort seek to demonstrate the effectiveness of commercial cloud platforms and services in supporting applications that are critical to growing academic and research computing and computational science communities, and seeks to illustrate the viability of these services as an option for leading-edge research across a broad scope of science. The project helps researchers understand the potential benefit of larger-scale commercial platforms for scientific application workflows such as those currently using NSF's High-Performance Computing (HPC). It also explores how scientific workflows can innovatively leverage advancements provided by commercial cloud providers. The project aims to accelerate scientific discovery through integration and optimization of commercial cloud service advancements; identify gaps between cloud provider capabilities and their potential for enhancing academic research; and provide initial steps in documenting emerging tools and leading deployment practices to share with the community. Cloud computing has revolutionized enterprise computing over the past decade and it has the potential to provide similar impact for campus-based scientific workloads. The E-CAS project explores this potential by providing two phases of funded campus-based projects addressing acceleration of science. Each phase is followed by a community-led workshop to assess lessons learned and to define leading practices. Projects are selected from two categories; time-to-science (to achieve the best time-to-solution for scientific application/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). The project is guided by an external advisory board including leading academic experts in computational science and other fields, commercial cloud representatives, NSF program officers, and others. It leverages prior and concurrent NSF investments while creating a new model of scalable cloud service partnerships to enhance science in a broad spectrum of disciplines. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.