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 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.   The programme will be finalised over the coming weeks but will including talks from representatives from research organisations, public cloud providers and the OpenStack community.

Invitation for abstracts

In addition, we are looking for contributions from the community on the above topics.  As part of the registration, you will be invited to make a submission for an abstract.   Depending on numbers and the hosting venue we hope to support different formats for submissions.  This may include lightning talks, demonstrations or plugfest format to give the opportunity for small groups to work together on a short targeted technical activity.

Proposal for plugfest / Interactive Session

To avoid having a whole day of only presentations and talks, we would like to invite interested attendees to demonstrate some Real Work™.  The focus should be 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.   This is session is still to be confirmed and is dependent on interest from you the community and the resources available to us at the venue.    Please submit your interest / ideas with your registration.

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).