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Date: Fri, 9 Dec 2011 10:04:14 -0500
From: Dwight Hines <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: [log in to unmask]
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [Net-Gold] How Clouds are Transforming Education,
Research and Libraries
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How Clouds are Transforming Education,
Research and Libraries
Bill St. Arnaud
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/2011/12/
how-clouds-are-transforming-education.html
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A shorter URL for the above link:
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http://tinyurl.com/7vgjyzk
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I am forwarding this in toto because
it will be of interest to you
specifically, and to many of your
readers. St. Arnaud is a good man and
knows what tech stuff is good and is
junk, and inbetween good and junk.
dh
Link provided for omitted parts
DD
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==========================
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*How clouds are transforming education,
research and libraries*
Bill St. Arnaud
Fri, Dec 9, 2011 at 7:10 AM
Blessed, Endorsed, Recommended,
and Approved by D. Hines
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[I recently the great pleasure of
visiting JISC and JANET in the UK
and was very impressed on their
understanding of the potential of
commercial clouds to radically
transform education, research and
libraries. Clouds promise to unleash
researchers, educators,
administrators and librarians from
the mundane tasks of administration
and other services freeing them to
focus on their core interests.
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Clouds may also radically transform
campus network architectures as
they continue the trend of driving
more and more traffic away from
local servers to distant cloud
providers. In fact some research and
education networks are concerned
that the next explosion in traffic
will not be from higher education
institutions, but from community
colleges, further education and
elementary schools. As these
institutions look to replace textbooks
with iPads and similar devices
where all the education materials and
library tools are located in the
cloud, the need for high bandwidth
fiber connectivity to every
education institution will be critical.
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For the research community exploding
data volumes mean that data
management activities often become
all-consuming. It is this
realization that recently led a
number of researchers such as Ian
Foster to launch Globus Online.
It aims to provide complex and
time-consuming research management
processes via SaaS (Software as a
Service) using commercial clouds.
In the first phases of this project,
it will be focused on relatively
simple processes, like data movement.
But the goal is to make the
discovery potential of massive data,
exponentially faster computers,
and deep interdisciplinary
collaboration accessible to every
one of the million or more
professional researchers worldwide
not just a select few ?big
science? projects.
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The Globus Online is particularly
designed to address the needs of
small science projects. It is
believed that small science is where
most scientists work and where the
vast majority of discovery occurs,
but it's an area that hasn't seen
a lot of focus in terms of
infrastructure software. It's also
an area where big problems are
emerging (because of the data deluge)
and where the traditional big
science approach (build a big team,
construct a custom software
solution) isn't feasible.
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Big increases in data generated
within research laboratories entail
more demands for more careful data
management. Researchers need not
just data storage but full service
data lifecycle management
processes, encompassing data
collection, storage, sharing, metadata,
search, archiving, provenance, etc.
Establishing and efficiently
executing such processes would
demand substantial time and resources
that most researchers do not have,
and cannot easily acquire. The
Globus Online initiative proposes
to outsource the entire lifecycle
management process to a third party
developed and operated by
dedicated staff who are experts at
performing relevant tasks reliably,
securely, and at scale.
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JISC is actually putting theory into
practice by developing a number
of cloud based tools for researchers
as shown below.
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But as Ian Foster points out, this
move to clouds will also require a
new third party delivery organizations
to develop the common services
for researchers, educators and
librarians that will operate on
commercial clouds. As you can see
from the following pointers JISC is
leading the world in developing
these services using commercial cloud
services brokered by JANET. And as
noted in the JANET blog, I suspect
that many commercial cloud services
will provide their services for
free, or almost free, to the research
and education community.
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The
value proposition of universities or
colleges operating their own
servers or clusters I think is
going to rapidly disappear in the
coming years.
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Most importantly these cloud services
will allow universities to
dramatically reduce their carbon
footprint by using zero carbon
commercial cloud providers as recently
demonstrated by SURFnet in
their SURFnet 7 launch of connecting
lightpaths from the Netherlands
to GreenQcloud in Iceland. University
and college computing facilities
can represent anywhere from 15-40% all
electricity consumption at a
typical institution-?BSA]
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SAVING LIBRARIES
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http://www.jisc.ac.uk/inform/
inform32/SavingLibraries.html
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The battle for time and resource
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A new cloud-based service is set to
transform the way libraries work,
unleashing librarians from their
admin burden to focus on services for
students and researchers.
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This cloud service is called the
Shared Academic Knowledge Base plus,
or KB+, and will be a database
covering all ?subscribed resources?
from a UK higher education perspective.
That includes data such like
publication information, holdings
and rights, subscription management,
organisations, licences and evidence
such as usage statistics and
financial data in an online catalogue
across all UK academic
libraries.
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SNIP
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Cloud Services for researchers
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https://www.globusonline.org/inthenews/
accelerating-discovery-by-outsourcing-
the-mundane-an-interview-with-ian-foster/
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Accelerating Data Intensive Science
by Outsourcing the Mundane
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http://www.slideshare.net/ianfoster/
rpi-talk-foster-september-2011
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JISC cloud services for researchers
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http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/umf.aspx
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UMF Shared Services and the Cloud Programme
The ?12.5 million UMF Shared Services
and the Cloud Programme is part
of a suite of activities under the
University Modernisation Fund
(UMF), a HEFCE fund that aims to
help universities and colleges
deliver better efficiency and value
for money through the development
of shared services.
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SNIP
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Bill St. Arnaud
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Green Internet Consultant.
Practical solutions to reducing GHG
emissions such as free broadband and
electric highways.
.
http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/
email: [log in to unmask]
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro
JANET UK brokerage
http://www.janetbrokerage.ac.uk/
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We?re seeing a number of providers
thinking about offering some
element of their cloud service for
free to the education sector, as
well as highly secure government
clouds starting to come online too.
There?s a fair chance higher education
institutions will want to
take advantage of all of these
offerings to one degree or another and
if we do, the management of identity
could frankly become a nightmare
with multiple cloud providers in use
simultaneously.
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SNIP
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------
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Bill St. Arnaud
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Green Internet Consultant.
Practical solutions to reducing GHG
emissions such as free broadband and
electric highways.
http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/
email: [log in to unmask]
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro
.
.
http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/2011/12/
how-clouds-are-transforming-education.html
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A shorter URL for the above link:
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http://tinyurl.com/7vgjyzk
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The complete article may be read at the URL above.
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