MW-RCD Cloud Residency Summary

Midwest Research Computing and Data Consortium Residency Program

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 2227627. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Executive Summary

The Indiana University Research Cloud Infrastructure team met with representatives of University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana over two days on August 30th and 31st, 2023. The goal of this residency program funded by the Midwest Research Computing and Data Consortium was to establish a relationship and rapport between research cloud staff at these institutions and create a free flow of ideas and information. Ultimately, the goal with these efforts is to create better standards of practice and to share successes and failures for creating better research environments on cloud resources. 

Residency Details

Funding for this event was provided by the Midwest Research Computing and Data Consortium and was initiated via their webform that initiated the planning process. The proposed plan (attached) was for 1.5 days of informal discussions centered around cloud computing as related to academic research. We submitted a simple, high-level agenda and proposed budget and had an approval within a business day. Once approved, we worked with a local administrative assistant to begin all the arrangements. We had previously spoken with colleagues at UIUC about this so we had two candidates (Benjamin Sperry and Jess Haney) and some proposed dates already in mind as we began the process.

For the meetings, we went with an informal format. We wanted some structure to make sure we had topics as needed but also wanted the conversation to be organic and to hit topics that were of the most interest to the UIUC staff attending. The cloud services currently being run by UIUC are somewhat different in focus and operation from Jetstream2 or the upcoming IU Research Cloud, but common ground was found in looking at resource and user management practices between the different organizations. 

There were extended talks on managing file systems and data stewardship, with both organizations noting similar issues with longer term data management and user access. An unexpected longer discussion into user interfaces turned into a demonstration of Exosphere, the open source interface used by Jetstream2 from the Exosphere maintainers (both of which happen to work for Indiana University). There was also a longer discussion on orchestration with a focus on Kubernetes. 

All in all, it was time well spent to get views from other research cloud maintainers. It both yields common ground and exposes different methodologies that both teams may benefit from. In regard to the experience, Benjamin Sperry of UIUC said, “It was a great opportunity to share ideas and establish relationships.” His colleague, Jess Haney echoed that sentiment and expanded with “In the modern world of mostly instant messaging and virtual meetings, having the dedicated time in person to exchange cloud computing ideas and network with like-minded people felt extremely refreshing! I would love the opportunity to have this experience again.” 

High Level Schedule (August 31, 2023 – September 1, 2023)