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The Cloud and Desktop as a Service as a teaching tool for

different research communities

David WallomOxford e-Research Centre

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Overview

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

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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.

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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.

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How do we run teaching or training now?

• Specialised resources– Infrastructure– Materials linked to infrastructure

• Recipient responsible for translation to home environment

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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

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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• Updates to software and services make materials quickly out of date with relatively minor changes that are irrelevant to what is actually being taught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

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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

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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

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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

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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 Live Local 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 # Core Memory (GB) Cost(Credit/hour)

Standard 1 16 0

Standard+ 2 40 1

Big 8 140 4

Max 16 500 12

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?