This coming spring researchers at the University of Oregon, led by professor Allen Malony, will have access to a cloud system following a $1.97 million grant under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
The university’s system, which will be an Applied Computational Instrument for Scientific Synthesis (ACISS) will be installed in the Computing Center and shared by a wide array of departments to meet the goals of integrative science projects.
The list of those in queue to make use of the system includes researchers studying of behavior via brain imaging data as well as various projects in bioinformatics, chemistry and neuroinformatics.
The goal of integrative science is to examine problems across disciplines, looking for relationships between diverse areas of study and melding them into one cohesive whole for closer study and the school’s new ACISS open source-driven cloud cluster will provide “hundreds of terabytes of storage space, thousands of processing cores, high performance computational accelerators and high-speed integrated InfiniBand network interfaces.”
As Malony stated in an interview, “The ACISS system is at the forefront of a revolution to apply cloud computing for scientific investigation. Building on technological advances in multi-core processing and GPU computing, ACISS will be realized as a private science cloud offering the most powerful computing resources yet at UO in pursuit of research discoveries in biology, physics, chemistry, human brain science and computer science.”
When asked about the ultimate benefit of the grant and ACISS system, Malony responded, “…the cloud computing model encompasses the notion of clouds interacting with other clouds to enhance their services and expand their resources. The ACISS project is a bellwether for the future of computing throughout Oregon’s educational institutions.”