In Research IT we believe building partnerships is a key part of growing and sustaining a thriving ecosystem for campus research computing. Our efforts to support cloud computing are one of several ways that we work to build community on our campus, across the UC system, and beyond.
To kick off the 2017-2018 academic year we hosted a brainstorming session to pull together many of our partners including the Social Sciences D-Lab, The Library, Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS), and IST (Information Services & Technology) to help refine Cloud Working Group on-campus activities for the fall. During the kick-off we thought about how we might coordinate our efforts to follow cloud-related discussions at the UC-wide summer UCCSC 2017 gathering, as well as future work with Berkeley’s IST (Information Services & Technology) on strategic planning for campus cloud services.
As part of the Fall program, we continue to host regular gatherings that are open to the community to join:
- bi-weekly in-person meetings at D-Lab in 365 Barrows Hall during the Fall and Spring that focuses on cloud-based workflows for research, teaching, and training; in this forum we coordinate with the Machine Learning Working Group and Computational Text Analysis Working Group at D-Lab.
- monthly AWS-users group videoconference call co-hosted with California Digital Library (CDL) / UC Office of the President (UCOP).
You can find out when the next session is happening by checking our main Cloud Working Group page. In addition to the working group format, we provide cloud consulting support via scheduled appointments with a BRC Consultant or our office hours at the AIS (Academic Innovation Studio).
In October, we also co-hosted a three-hour Zero to JupyterHub Hands-on Workshop along with the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS) and the Jupyter Project. Over 30 participants from the research, teaching, and technology support communities learned about how to set up and run their own JupyterHub with a custom Docker image deployed on the Google Cloud Platform (see the workshop slides).
Among the attendees were our partners at Globus, which provides technology that enables reliable, high-speed data transfer, management, and sharing on campus cyberinfrastructure; the Globus team joined us following the workshop for an architecture brainstorming session about the ways we might integrate the Globus SDK in JupyterHub deployments for researchers.
To get involved please visit our Cloud Working Group page and also join us in real-time for our meetings, or virtually via:
- UC Tech Slack channels #cloud, #research-it, #amazon-web-services
- Or for work related to JupyterHub, Binder, and Kubernetes for teaching and/or research, join the UC Jupyter Slack and the Jupyter project’s public github.