HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING
Ubiquitous cloud bursting on the horizon for universities
Cloud bursting is revolutionising research at universities says Mahesh Pancholi, research computing specialist at OCF
A lot of universities are now engaging in cloud bursting and are regularly taking advantage of public cloud infrastructures that are widely available from large companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft. The concept of cloud
bursting essentially came out of spare capacity that Amazon had on its massive server farms while running its websites. These server farms were built to meet particularly high demands at times like Christmas and Black Friday, but the rest of the time they sat idle – so the idea was created to sell that spare capacity.
This has since grown into
a whole business otherwise known as infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Instead of having to buy your own kit and run your own services, you can rent time on someone else’s server and use their data centre resources. There is no longer a need to worry about power and electricity costs, data centre space or system administrator’s fees, as you pay a subscription cost to the IaaS company that will do it all for you.
Cloud bursting in universities The uptake of the public cloud in universities has already happened, particularly when providing core IT services. By using Office 365, rather than an in-house email server, a university is utilising capacity in the cloud, so instead of
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having a rack of servers and system administrators to run their email service, it has become a full service from the public cloud for all of the university’s users. That’s probably where the biggest uptake started – and, since then, there has been
”The concept of cloud bursting essentially came out of spare capacity that Amazon had on its massive server farms whilst running its websites”
the realisation that at some point in the future these cloud services are likely to be cheaper to run than buying your own equipment and running it all in-house. In general, there has
certainly been enthusiasm to move towards cloud services and out of that came the OpenStack revolution, which is seen by many as the best of both worlds. You get a ‘cloud-like’ service with the ability to provision whatever type of server you want as a virtual machine, but with the advantage of it being on site, giving you the control, privacy and data sovereignty. For example, many
organisations prefer not to put HR data on the cloud, but if you have OpenStack on site, you have a flexible
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