Towards a Swiss National Research Infrastructure

Abstract

Abstract. In this position paper, we describe the current status and plans for a Swiss National Research Infrastructure. Swiss academic and research institutions are very autonomous. While being loosely coupled, they do not rely on any centralized management entities. A coordinated national research infrastructure can only be established by federating the local resources of the individual institutions. We discuss current efforts and business models for a federated infrastructure.

Real-Time Environmental Monitoring for Cloud-Based Hydrogeological Modeling with HydroGeoSphere

“…The longer term benefit is in assisting researchers to leverage IaaS architectures and to help them develop Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) services to support their own communities. We use the Swiss Academic Compute Cloud (Swis-sACC) cloud infrastructure [13] based on OpenStack, which provides a highly scalable distributed computing infrastructure for academic research. The OpenStack platform provides us with the API to develop a highly scalable distributed computing infrastructure.…”

Wireless Mesh Networks and Cloud Computing for Real Time Environmental Simulations

“…Cloud computing is a growing business with many established players such as Salesforce, Amazon, Akamai, and Google. We integrated our work with the ongoing SwissACC project [6], which aims to establish a Swiss nationwide cloud computing infrastructure. Cloud providers offer several service models, however, we concentrate on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), which provides us with the required number of powerful Virtual Machines (VMs) on-demand and remote control through the Internet.…”

“…The VMs are extremely useful, because they can accommodate any generic type of computations, while they do not actually require any physical maintenance from the user side. SwissACC builds upon the open-source infrastructure, OpenStack 6 . OpenStack comes along with the Nova controller, which automates pool managing of worker resources.…”