HANOVER, N.H., Oct. 29, 2018 – Dartmouth is joining the Aristotle Cloud Federation, a group of universities that are working together to build a cloud computing resource to be used in academic research.
Dartmouth joins project leader Cornell University and co-PIs University at Buffalo and University of California, Santa Barbara, in exploring the computing model, which the three schools have been building under a National Science Foundation Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure award.
“We’re excited about this opportunity,” said Mitchel Davis, vice president and chief information officer at Dartmouth. “A federated cloud model has the potential to facilitate resource-sharing between campuses and is emerging as an important consideration in cyberinfrastructure ecosystem planning.”
Davis said he hopes to provide Dartmouth researchers with access to cost-effective, on-demand systems, software, and data in a hybrid fashion that will let them choose from private, public, and federated cloud offerings.
He would also like to broaden Dartmouth’s collaboration with researchers at other universities. A federated approach to providing resources and consulting support would enhance research and academic services and be a catalyst for new collaborations, Davis said.
Aristotle project leader and principal investigator David Lifka said the federation is looking forward to working with Dartmouth to bring science and digital humanities into the project.
“New use cases provide us the feedback we need to harden federation technologies and fine-tune our documentation,” said Lifka, the vice president for information technologies and chief information officer at Cornell, where he directs the Center for Advanced Computing.
George Morris, research computing director at Dartmouth, said he is eager to learn how the federated cloud resources will complement Dartmouth’s research capabilities.
“Being the first university outside of the Aristotle developer sites to be part of the federation gives us a unique opportunity to experiment with Aristotle’s federated authentication, accounting, and cloud metric tools and to learn more about this emerging technology,” Morris said.
The project team is building a federated cloud model to enable institutions to share resources through cross-institution allocations, account for cloud usage, collect and analyze cloud metrics with Open XDMoD, and burst to public clouds, said Lifka.
Buffalo’s Tom Furlani, director of the university’s Center for Computational Research, and Rich Wolski, professor of computer science at UC Santa Barbara, are co-PIs on the project.
Source: Dartmouth