1 The Cloud and Desktop as a Service as a teaching tool for different research communities David Wallom Oxford e-Research Centre

2 Overview What is teaching/training? Teaching/training now IaaS Cloud as a training environment Desktop as a Service, combining training and research environments

3 What is teaching/training? Organized activity aimed at imparting information and/or instructions to improve the recipient's performance or to help him or her attain a required level of knowledge or skill.

4 What is teaching/training? Organized activity aimed at imparting information and/or instructions to improve the recipient's performance or to help him or her attain a new or required level of knowledge or skill.

5 How do we run teaching or training now? Specialised resources –Infrastructure –Materials linked to infrastructure Recipient responsible for translation to home environment

6 How do we run teaching or training now? Specialised resources –Infrastructure Replication of production environment which must be kept in sync but will only be rarely used –Materials linked to infrastructure Recipient responsible for translation to home environment

7 How do we run teaching or training now? Specialised resources –Infrastructure –Materials linked to infrastructure Updates to software and services make materials quickly out of date with relatively minor changes that are irrelevant to what is actually being taught Recipient responsible for translation to home environment

8 How do we run teaching or training now? Specialised resources –Infrastructure –Materials linked to infrastructure Recipient responsible for translation to home environment –Not guaranteed even possible to directly translate to equipment or services locally available

9 What happens when you run training courses? The unexpected… User break things in ways you never thought possible Users get ahead of themselves and don’t know why? You get many more applicants than resources available

10 How can we improve training provision? The unexpected, live demo syndrome x 100! –Support practice in a uniform environment User break things in ways you never thought possible –Restart services from the beginning Users get ahead of themselves and don’t know why? –Rollback to a known state quickly and easily You get many more applicants than resources available –Scale beyond a simple training infrastructure to support usage on the production service

11 Cloud as a training environment No data transfer Sandboxed users means training on production environment Uniform preconfigured instances Uniform environment from training event to home Preconfigured instances supporting, snapshotting, rollback and restart

Bio-Linux: A scalable solution Comprehensive, free bioinformatics workstation based on Ubuntu Linux and Debian Med 10 years & 8 major releases Over 7000 users from 1600 locations 200+ bioinf packages including big integrative tools :- QIIME, Galaxy Server, PredictProtein, EMBOSS,...Incorporates all software Dual BootLinux LiveLocal Servers Cloud

Why Cloud? Data sets can be too big or restricted to easily move – ‘training’ sets are unrepresentative – move the compute to the data – Researcher work patterns are maintained Tools such as Bio-Linux are community enablers More efficient use of shared resources

EOS Cloud A tenancy in the JASMIN Unmanaged Cloud Web interfaces based on JASMIN custom IaaS software platform ‘Users’ or VMAdmin are registered JASMIN users Each receives two VMs – Bio-Linux – Ubuntu Docker hosting environment Users with total responsibility for instantiated system Accessible though standard remote desktop tools

Boosting Resource Capabilities A resource permanently scaled to support the heaviest workload would be a waste – Can we scale the users virtual services to take demand into account? Users VMs startup and operate in native state ‘Standard’ – Enough capability to access stored data – Configure applications and workflows – ‘Free’ User may boost his running VM to increased capability – Enough to run installed Bio-Linux analysis applications on useful timescale – Credit consumption only for Boosted instances Reference datasets available to users through shared storage Name# CoreMemory (GB)Cost(Credit/ho ur) Standard1160 Standard+2401 Big81404 Max

Desktop as a Service for research Giving researchers environments they are confident in by changing the infrastructure around them Creating a new user facility for natural environment research communities Training researchers where they will do their research Utilise generic cloud capabilities – Package would operate on any IaaS Cloud – Currently using native VMWare interfaces – Not using platform specific capabilities - no impediment to standards adoption

Desktop as a Service for research

Desktop as a Service for training

THANK YOU AND QUESTIONS?