RCUK Cloud-WG Meeting – March 6th 2017

RCUK Cloud-WG Meeting

06 March 2017

EMBL-EBI, Hinxton

Attendees

  • Dr David Colling, Imperial College (via Skype)
  • Martin Hamilton, Jisc (notes)
  • Adam Huffman, Francis Crick Institute
  • Philip Kershaw, STFC (chair)
  • Simon Thompson, University of Birmingham
  • Steven Newhouse, EMBL-EBI

Joining later in meeting:

  • Dr Tim Cutts, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute
  • Stig Tefler, Stack HPC / OpenStack Scientific Computing Group (for timed business)

Apologies for absence

  • Dr David Fergusson, University of Edinburgh
  • Jeremy Yates, University College London / STFC DiRAC
  • Dr David Salmon, Jisc

Notes & action items

  1. Dr Tim Cutts, Head of Scientific Computing at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, was welcomed to the group

  2. The group has been developing a briefing note on legal and policy issues for use of public cloud in research, led by David Salmon
    ACTION Steven Newhouse to provide written feedback to David Salmon on legal/policy draft

  3. Interest had been expressed in holding a workshop on the use of TerraForm configuration management system
    ACTION Steven Newhouse to explore holding the TerraForm workshop at the Hinxton genome campus with his team at EMBL-EBI

  4. Slides from the November 2016 workshop are now online at https://cloud.ac.uk/workshops/
    ACTION Phil Kershaw to write up summary of the workshop and share with the Cloud-SIG list

  5. The group agreed that it would share meeting notes via the cloud.ac.uk website
    ACTION Martin Hamilton to write up summary notes of the working group meeting (this document)

  6. Following on from the group’s earlier pilot activity around exploring the practicalities of running Large Hadron Collider workflows in public cloud, Adam had discussed further potential pilot activities with Dr Alan Real, chair of HPC-SIG and N8 HPC Technical Director. The group were keen to follow up this conversation
    ACTION Adam Huffman to explore potential for further pilots and workshops with Alan Real

  7. Simon shared the draft report that he had been developing on use of IBM Spectrum Scale (formerly GPFS) in a cloud environment, which the group agreed would be a useful addition to the cloud.ac.uk website
    ACTION Simon thompson to complete Spectrum Scale report and share final version with the group for approval

  8. The group discussed the Boston Cloud Declaration initiative (see https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Boston-Cloud-Congress) with Stig Telfer from the OpenStack Scientific Working Group and agreed that it would keep a watching brief on this
    ACTION Phil Kershaw (and others where available) to join Cloud Declaration conference calls

  9. It was noted that the UK National e-Infrastructure Project Directors Group (PDG) was holding a workshop on March 29th to map out access and interoperability issues around the core e-infrastructure underpinning UK research. Several members of the group had been been invited to speak
    ACTION All to discuss share plans for PDG workshop at next Cloud-WG meeting

 

Date of Next Meeting

22nd March 2017 – conference call

ACTION Phil Kershaw to set up March 22nd telco