In the lecture theatres of London’s Bloomsbury colleges, staff and students are swapping audio and video thanks to a JISC-funded cloud project; in universities across the UK, research data managers are exploring how to make best use of the cloud through the universities modernisation fund. And around a table of international delegates, JISC is now working on a Europe-wide initiative called e-InfraNet bringing together European universities to make pioneering connections in three areas: green computing, cloud computing and open standards.

‘These were areas where no national activities were taking place and we were concerned with getting them moving forward in a joined up way,’ says JISC executive secretary Malcolm Read.

‘Green computing’ tries to cut down on the environmental impact of computing. ‘Cloud computing’ allows you to access all the services you need, whenever you need them, over the Internet, saving on space, money, maintenance costs, support staff, downtime, management time, and backup hardware and storage. It also allows groups of universities to gather resources together to provide services to their internal users and others – if some resources are idle at one university for some reason, another university can use those resources instead – collectively, they need to buy and manage fewer machines than if they bought them all individually. It also means that universities can group together to create new services within this cloud that they wouldn’t be able to deploy normally.

But to do this, universities need open standards to ensure that it’s possible to move from cloud to cloud as easily as possible. These standards are necessary for data, networking, storage and most other aspects of the computing infrastructure. Data standards can also help researchers with making their data openly available, help students find data that can augment and improve their learning experience, and reduce the costs both in terms of time and money of doing so.

Read sees cloud computing as potentially the most cost-effective way of meeting the large demands of storing research data. ‘It’s certainly taxing universities in this country – the cost of providing data storage is proving to be rather more than some universities can afford in present circumstances.’ But he also sees cloud taking over in other areas, such as grid computing, which is used to combine smaller computers together to solve difficult computations. ‘If you’ve got central cloud provision, it’ll do compute as well as data if you want it to.’

Read says a joined-up approach across Europe would be of great benefit to the majority of European countries. JISC and partner bodies are looking at developing clouds across Europe at a ‘granularity that makes economic sense’ and that would be supra-national in the case of the majority of European countries.

To accommodate the shift to cloud computing, however, researchers are going to have to change their attitude to IT. ‘They have a natural desire to keep all the hardware and facilities in their laboratory under their desk and they rightly or wrongly think that that’s the most secure and controllable way of doing it. But it’s not particularly cost-effective and not a particularly secure way of doing it.’ To overcome this, researchers’ concerns over where their programs and data actually are in the cloud will need to be addressed, which is something the e-InfraNet discussions are considering.

While the UK is certainly able to show parts of Europe a trick or two when it comes to cloud computing, other countries can share their knowledge regarding green computing. ‘We’ve done a lot of work on green at the institutional level about how universities can cut their electricity bills, whereas Finland for instance has a very much more national approach,’ says Read.

However, he says JISC should take more of an advisory role over green computing, showing institutions how they can be greener; with cloud, JISC will be able to help define the interoperability standards. At the moment, JISC through e-InfraNet is looking just at discussing and understanding with the different European member states what the potential is for cloud and what demand is going to be like at both the national and supranational level. Data standards are also going to receive considerable focus: ‘Open data is probably the area we’re going to concentrate on, since there’s the mantra, top-level statements that the output of public research should be publically available. But a lot of policy work is needed.’

The UK considers there is demonstrable EU added-value in … the coordination of Member States’ national research programmes.’
Funding for EU research and innovation from 2014: a UK perspective
Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, May 2011

The intent of e-InfraNet is that by the end of 2012, the bodies involved will be able to inform the EC about the potential things that could be done across Europe, and if possible, get funding which Read says ‘will help considerably’. It’salso looking to coordinate national policies and lobby for European policies that are in line with the needs of the member states.

Although it’s early days for e-InfraNet, in the long term it has the potential to make computing power just another utility, like water or electricity, for every HE body and student in Europe. It will reduce costs, make services available to researchers and students that would not otherwise have been available, and make data – whether experimental or even just lecture notes from other universities – openly available to students and researchers who need them. A lot of work is going to be needed and a lot of details sorted out, but the future is in the cloud.

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