Our next workshop is on March 3rd 2020!

We will be back at The Francis Crick Institute in central London. As with previous events we are looking forward to a varied programme from the UK research community. We expect the workshop to be a mix of technical talks with researchers reporting on their use of cloud technologies.

Registration

Registration is now open – follow the link below. The event is hosted for the UK research community to provide an opportunity to meet, network, and share experiences about the application of cloud computing for their work.

http://bit.ly/register-ukri-cloud-workshop2020

Abstract Submission

We’re looking for talk submissions covering all aspects of research computing using cloud, both public and private. 

We’ve provided some suggested topics and themes below, but submissions outside of these areas are also welcome. Talk sessions are typically 20 minutes and should include time for questions. We’d also like to record and share the videos and slides afterwards, so please make it clear in your submission if this is likely to be an issue. To submit an abstract complete this form:

http://bit.ly/abstract-submission-ukri-cloud-workshop2020

The deadline for submissions is 31st January. The Cloud Working Group will review the submission and we’ll let successful submitters know by 7 February.

Workshop themes

IoT and AI/Data Analysis

Are you using public cloud services to support your research? Perhaps you are using Deepmind or cognitive services to support your AI and machine learning workloads, or maybe using services like distance matrix to support IoT workloads! The IoT and Data Analysis thread is looking for speakers who aren’t necessarily using cloud for HPC/HTC workloads, but using many API services available to support their research.

Hybrid Cloud

We are looking for examples of deployments which bridge between on-premise infrastructure and public cloud or between cloud providers. This could include efforts to make workloads portable between clouds, technologies to support migration and bursting. In addition the important topic of data movement whether it be staging data for processing or sharing data using cloud.

Development, deployment and operations for private and/or community clouds

Are you involved in running a private or community cloud infrastructure? Have an interesting technical challenge that you have faced (and overcome)? Do you have some benchmark data showing different ways of using your infrastructure?

HPC in the cloud, performance and benchmarking

We would like to hear from the community about experiences running HPC style workloads in the cloud. This could include for example Azure CycleCloud, AWS ParallelCluster or your own Infrastructure-as-Code approaches (e.g. Terraform) for cluster deployment. Have you done any benchmarking of HPC performance in public cloud? Are you using MPI, running latency sensitive applications or using technology like RDMA?

Addressing challenges integrating storage and data access interfaces for scientific workloads

Virtualisation and the dynamic and self-service nature of cloud services can present challenges for scientific workloads from the point of view of performance, functionality and flexibility. We would like to hear your experiences, positive or negative, with cloud storage services (block, parallel filesystem, object, or others).  Have you had success in data locality aware job scheduling? Was the performance and costs in line with expectations and did you need to make significant code changes to get the best out of cloud storage?

Research outputs from use of cloud

Have you used the cloud to conduct your research? Have you published any papers where the analysis or calculations used cloud resources? How did you use the cloud and what were the advantages and disadvantages? We are looking for speakers who have used cloud to run real production workloads who can present a short case study of their experience.

Organisational challenges in Cloud Computing – procurement, data governance, legal and cost controls

While cloud computing provides many technical challenges, it also provides many organisational challenges – procurement, data governance, legal controls, cost controls, etc. – that need to be resolved for successful adoption of cloud computing. This session will bring together contributions from across the community:

• How have organisations procured their clouds? What internal controls (if any) have they imposed on their use?
• How are they managing the security and data governance aspects? What training is being provided to help staff transition to such a model?
• How are you establishing a sustainable financial environment for cloud usage? How have you engaged with institutional and research funding sources to balance CAPEX and OPEX demands.

All aspects of how cloud computing is integrated into an organisation will be considered.