The RCUK Cloud Working Group are hosting this 2nd annual workshop to bring to together researchers and technical specialists to share expertise in the application of cloud computing technology for the research community. The meeting will include presentations from a range of research domains including particle physics, the environmental sciences, medical research and bioinformatics.

This workshop will focus on key areas to address in order for the potential of cloud computing for research to be fully realised:

• technical integration: addressing the challenges in moving and running research workloads on public and private cloud

• equiping the research community with the skills they need to exploit cloud

• tackling legal and regulatory issues around the use of public cloud

Programme

The final programme is available here:

http://bit.ly/rcuk-cloud-workshop2016-programme

The workshop will consist of a series of presentations from invited speakers along with the opportunity to meet and network with other members of the research community. It will includes talks from representatives from research organisations, public cloud providers and the OpenStack community. Speakers include: Brendan Bouffler, AWS, Nico Gaviola, Google; Kenji Takeda, Microsoft Research; Stig Tefler, Openstack Scientific WG Co-chair.

Invitation for abstracts

In addition, we have been taking contributions from the community on the above topics as part of the workshop registration. These include presentations and shorter lightning talks. In addition a demonstrations and interactive session is being held to give the opportunity for groups to work together on a short targeted technical activity or share ideas.

Abstract submission is now formally closed but we are still keen to hear from new registrants about their interest areas. If you have a really exciting or novel thing you want to share please tell us about it on your registration!

Proposal for plugfest / Interactive Session

To avoid having a whole day of only presentations and talks, we have invited interested attendees to demonstrate some Real Work™. The focus is on interoperation and/or the use of open standards, particularly for building or using hybrid clouds for research (but hybrid could also be HPC/cloud, etc.) Standards can be any of relevance related to cloud APIs, use of container technologies, technologies for bulk data movement and also access control and single sign-on.

The RCUK Cloud Working Group and The Cloud for Research Special Interest Group exist to help researchers and technical specialists using cloud computing technologies and services to share knowledge and expertise. The Working Group and The Cloud-SIG is supported by Research Councils UK (RCUK).