Cooperative agreement aimed to catalyze the use of cloud computing platforms for scientific computing
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced a new cooperative agreement with Internet2, a nonprofit computer networking consortium, to build partnerships with commercial cloud computing providers and support science applications in new and more effective uses of cloud computing capabilities.
The NSF-funded Internet2 project, Exploring Clouds for Acceleration of Science (E-CAS), 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 and Google Cloud Platform have signed on as the initial cloud computing providers in this endeavor.
“The E-CAS project has the potential to not only demonstrate the effectiveness of current commercial cloud computing services in supporting a range of applications that are important to the science and engineering research communities, but also to enable these communities to leverage the innovative technologies and capabilities to significantly accelerate scientific discoveries,” said Manish Parashar, director of NSF’s Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure.
NSF has pledged $3 million for a two-phased approach to be managed by Internet2 and is expected to produce a deeper understanding of the use of cloud computing in accelerating scientific discoveries.
