Jetstream: A cloud for science and engineering research

Thanks to a $6.6m US National Science Foundation grant, thousands of US researchers will have easy access to advanced computing tools in a new cloud environment. The Pervasive Technology Institute (PTI) at Indiana University (IU) in Bloomington, US, received the grant to create Jetstream — the NSF’s first science and engineering research cloud.

The NSF expects to spend nearly $11m over the next five years to create, implement, and operate Jetstream. The user-friendly cloud environment will give researchers and students access to computing and data analysis resources on demand — from their tablets, laptops, or desktop computers. The target production date for Jetstream is January 2016.

The cloud environment will be attractive to communities that have not been heavy users of traditional high-performance computing systems, but that would benefit from advanced computational capabilities. Among those groups are researchers in biology, atmospheric science, observational astronomy, and the social sciences. Users will have access to a menu of virtual machines designed to support research in the different disciplines. Jetstream will also enable developers of research tools to make new software easily available to potential users.

“The new Jetstream cloud system will operate at the border between the existing NSF-funded cyberinfrastructure and thousands of new users,” says Craig Stewart, Jetstream principal investigator and executive director of PTI at IU. "We expect Jetstream to be of particular interest to researchers analyzing ‘born digital' data with research needs that are more suited to cloud computing than the traditional supercomputers that have been the mainstay of NSF-funded cyberinfrastructure in the past," Stewart says.

In addition to PTI, a seasoned team of US universities and organizations will implement Jetstream, including the Texas Advanced Computing Center at The University of Texas at Austin, the University of Chicago, the University of Arizona, and The University of Texas at San Antonio. Other collaborators include Johns Hopkins University, Pennsylvania State University, Cornell University, the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, the University of Hawaii, the National Snow and Ice Data Center, the Odum Institute at the University of North Carolina, and the National Center for Genome Analysis Support.

- Amber Harmon