Research Computing: Infrastructure as a Service

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The Research Computing Infrastructure as a Service (RCIS) provides instant high performance compute, storage, network resources and other functionality. It helps avoid the expense and complexity of buying and managing your own physical servers and other data centre infrastructure. It enables IT practitioners and research groups to build their own scalable platforms that fit their exact needs and requirements. Departmental IT or Research Groups are able to submit an application here to rent a portion of the available cloud resources, on which to build their own research computing platforms without needing to first provision physical hardware in their home department.

Please register your interest in the course and we will be in touch when we have finalised dates.

• This service is targeted at IT practitioners across the University and research groups with IT-proficient members
• Further details regarding eligibility criteria are available

* Differences between on-premises and cloud infrastructure

* How to “think cloud”. Some common architecture patterns

* General concepts and the main projects inside OpenStack

* Practical - Introduction to the most important OpenStack elements and concepts

* How to build a service in OpenStack

• Module 1: Exploring the web interface. How to log in to our OpenStack infrastructure in a step by step guide.
• Module 2: Networking service. The main concepts behind the OpenStack Networking service (Neutron)
• Module 3: Computing service. How to work with the OpenStack Computing service (Nova)
• Module 4: Storage services. Differences between block storage and object storage and enabled OpenStack Storage projects.
• Module 5: Orchestration Service. Introduces the main concepts regarding the OpenStack orchestration service.

The minimum requirement for this course will be an MCS Windows or Linux account, or bringing a personal laptop with the capability to run an SSH client and web browser of the user's choice.