The Aristotle Cloud Federation is a project of Cornell University in partnership University of California and the University at Buffalo. These three institutions have come together to build a federated cloud model, that aims to offer a solution for scientist who require analytical solutions and flexible workflows to handle large-scale data sets. This federated cloud features accounting models, data infrastructure building blocks and new allocations. The project hopes to get more institutions and collaborators involved and the system has been built with the support of grants received from the National Science Foundation.
Through collaboration partnerships, the project aims to see hybrid cloud becoming the main solution for academic investigation. Through simple, efficient collaboration and resource sharing, scientific research could be completed in a shorter period of time. The project is lead by David Lifka, Director of the Cornell University Center for Advanced Computing (CAC) along with Rich Wolski, Professor of Computer Science at the University of California and Tom Forlanu, Director of the Center for Computational Research at the University at Buffalo.
Aristotle Cloud Federation seeks to set up a federated cloud model that promotes large scare data sharing between institutions. Although supercomputers at specific locations, allow researchers to work on a vast amount of data, it would take about a week for the data sets to be available for use. With the Aristotle Cloud Federation, the wait time could be reduced as the system facilitates the efficient allocation of resources and since it can identify the best option to run an item, it will keep workloads optimized. It could speed up the process to obtain scientific results. The advances achieved through the project, including documentation and best practices will be shared with the community, in order to inspire and help to develop new research opportunities.
What Research and Sciences are supported?
The three universities leading the Aristotle Cloud Federation have build their own private cloud based on Eucalyptus, an open-source software acquired by Hewlett Packard in 2014, that allows the creation of and AWS-compatible and private and hybrid cloud computing solutions. There are seven science teams sharing the cloud and more than forty global collaborators are also taking part in the project. The initial teams using the Aristotle Cloud federation are working in the following areas: Chemistry, Finance, Astronomy, Food sciences, Civil engineering and Genomics. These fields were given priority as they are the most suitable options to show how the project can minimize the wait time to obtain research results, through resource and data sharing between institutions.
