Overview

Our Goals

Creating a regional resource by establishing a common cloud framework specifically designed for data-driven discovery and developing technologies to make it easy for academic researchers to take advantage of services not readily available to them today at our MGHPCC institutions. Including:

Create building blocks for production cloud services.
Collaborate with Systems Engineers that have established RC groups.
Onboard proof-of-concept use cases from MGHPCC and other Massachusetts institutions.

Our Long-term Vision

Engage with OpenStack communities, sharing best practices, and setting standards for deployments.
Regular communications with Mass Open Cloud (MOC) to assess the readiness of technologies they are developing with RedHat, Inc. and the NSF-funded Open Cloud Testbed for potential adoption in the NERC production environment.
Broaden the local deployment team of NERC to include partner universities within the MGHPCC consortium.

Our Core Concept

NERC production services (red) atop NESE storage services (blue) rely on MGHPCC (green) for core facility and network access. The Innovation Hub (grey) enables new technologies to be rapidly adopted by the NERC or NESE services. On the left are the Research and Learning communities (purple) which are the primary customers of NERC. As users proceed down the stack of production services from Web-apps, that require more technical skills, the Cloud Facilitators (orange) in the middle guide and educate users on how to best use the services. For more information, view NERC’s concept document.