There are several cloud computing resources that are available for computationally intensive research and/or teaching. Some of the most prevalent are included in this article.

Overview

For researchers without access to high-performance computing (HPC) resources, Information Services recommends several offerings including ACCESS-CI (formerly known as XSEDE and TeraGrid). ACCESS is a collection of shared computing systems distributed across many sites nationally. These resources are supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and are maintained as a free national resource. Available resources include systems for large shared memory (Symmetric MultiProcessing or SMP) applications, highly scalable applications (Massively Parallel Processing or MMP), traditional clusters, and more recently high-throughput computing (HTC) via Open Science Grid.

Details/Instructions

Please contact the IS Research Analyst, Fred Hagemeister ((804)287-6689, fhagemei@rchmond.edu) who is our university's ACCESS campus champion.

1. Jetstream2 (hosted by Indiana Univ, a substitute for AWS VMs, easier UI)
2. NSF’s ACCESS (research cyberinfrastructure that replaced XSEDE; 18K active users; can link from UR’s web site via on-ramp service)
3. Partnership to Advance Throughput (PATh) 
4. Science Gateways (SGX3)
5. National AI Research Resource (NAIRR) pilot — not fully funded yet
6. NSF’s Campus Cyberinfrastructure (CC*)
7. Campus Research Computing Consortium (CaRCC)
8. Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation (CASC)
9. Open OnDemand — easier UI for faculty; UR has this installed
10. Globus — fast, reliable, secure file transfers from anywhere to anywhere

More information is available at the following sites:

• NSF ACCESS - https://access-ci.org/
• NSF XSEDE Educational Allocations - https://www.xsede.org/allocations#types-education
• Open Science Grid - https://www.opensciencegrid.org/