Democratising research in the Australian cloud

Information technology is currently undergoing a dramatic transformation driven by an avalanche of data and our ubiquitous connectivity to the Internet. Consequently, we now have instant access to vast amounts of knowledge about our world and our social network. We can explore distant museums and libraries from the comfort of our home office and find the nearest restaurants all from our phones as we walk down the street. The enabling technologies powering this transformation are the network and the vast datacentres that contain, analyse, index and serve up this information to millions of people around the planet. This combination of technology has coalesced into a new paradigm for computing, called the cloud, whose potential is only beginning to be recognised.

The Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, in their report CLOUD COMPUTING: Opportunities and Challenges for Australia, observes that “there are valuable opportunities for Australia in cloud computing—for government, researchers and business. However, action by the Commonwealth Government is needed to ensure that these opportunities are grasped and unnecessary barriers removed.”

Science and research are one of these areas of valuable opportunity for Australia, which is why I’m here in Sydney to announce new collaborative cloud computing partnerships with three top Australian research organisations. Microsoft’s Gordon Bell said, “Cloud computing based on massive scale is clearly the computing platform for the next decade having established a firm foundation of understanding and use for commercial services. The Microsoft program will help Australia’s university research infrastructure better align with recommendations, opportunities and challenges posed in this report.”

But, first, why does this matter? Scientific questions and problems increasingly lie at the intersections of traditional disciplines—for example, understanding the impact of global warming on our ocean ecology. This challenge involves the complex interaction of global atmospheric and ocean models as well as marine ecosystem analysis. Data from ocean sensors and satellite observations must be integrated with the simulation model data. To fully understand the issue, researchers from multiple disciplines—from different cultures, using different research tools—have to work closely together. The results have to be carefully analysed and presented to policy makers.

With this increased demand on sharing and interdisciplinary collaboration has come an insatiable demand for easy-to-use tools and computing support, unfortunately requiring many researchers to assume additional systems administrator roles rather than devoting their time and talents to the research itself. The cost to maintain and refresh this computing infrastructure is becoming a larger and larger burden, and the economics are unsustainable. As a result, much of our research funding has focused (because of the power of computing for scientific discovery) on refreshes and repeated deployments of infrastructures on research campuses and laboratories. Yet at even the best funded research organisations, the majority of researchers do not have access to the computing resources they need.

Fortunately, the emergence of cloud computing coupled with powerful software on clients, such as a local desktop computer, offers a solution to this conundrum. Cloud computing can provide software applications and computing power to users as a service over the Internet via familiar tools. The offsite cloud is constantly managed and upgraded, providing the ability to deliver computational resources on demand, a “pay as you go” strategy with access to large scale computational capacity. The cost to use 10,000 processors for an hour is the same as using ten processors for 1,000 hours, but will deliver radically faster analysis to the researcher. Further, the cloud offers unique opportunities to support a global, multi-party and neutral type of collaboration—allowing a diverse set of experts scattered across multiple continents to bring their expertise to bear. The cloud allows all parties to access data in neutral ways in their own context via their own familiar tools and collaborate using many different models and designs, simulations and experiments.

To accelerate this paradigm shift, we’ve launched a worldwide initiative to work with governments and academic institutions to explore the power of rich client tools coupled with powerful cloud computation and data storage. The objective of the program is to provide massively scalable tools and services directly to researchers that they can access from their desktops using familiar software tools. Microsoft will work with research organisations to provide free access to Windows Azure advanced client-plus-cloud computing, the tools to access the cloud, and important cloud services and technical support. The research organisations will identify the programs that will receive the free cloud services and support.

To date, Microsoft has signed agreements with the U.S. National Science Foundation, Japan’s NII Info-Plosion project, the European Commission, and today, in Australia, with the three leading research organisations: The Australian National University’s National Computational Infrastructure, the National Information and Communications Technology Australia (NICTA) and The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).

We believe our efforts can help to drive a global shift—a shift to invest more in research and in the acquisition of cloud services rather than in the distributed maintenance of infrastructure, allowing researchers to focus on unsolved questions and discovery, not on computer systems administration. If you’re interested in reading more about our vision of how client plus cloud computing can democratise research, see our recently published White Paper.

About this guest writer: Dr. Dennis Gannon is visiting us from Microsoft’s main campus in Redmond, WA, USA. He is currently the director of engagements for the company’s eXtreme Computing Group.

Comments

• Anonymous
  December 13, 2010
  This article doesn't address one really critical question. Should Australian Government use a commercial cloud for scientific endeavours or other innovation. Particularly one controlled via a foreign power. Note that I'm not stating whether the Australian Government should or should not do so, however when data is stored and traded in external jurisdictions this question needs to be thoroughly addressed. Cheers, Craig