By using virtual machines (VMs) you configure through your cloud account, you can customize the computing environment to meet your unique needs. Carry out both data and computationally intensive work easily. Use the cloud to build portals and platforms, or to handle data that you’re scraping from the web. Then share your work with your other devices, your team or other collaborators.
Who should use the cloud service?
- Researchers who need continuously running jobs or services, rather than batch processing.
- Researchers requiring a web portal.
- Researchers who need a VM, need to control their own operating system, and want the ability to customize software stacks.
- Researchers who need to build specialized virtual clusters for big data.
Users of the cloud service should ideally have at least an intermediate technical knowledge in systems management. The Alliance can also provide support through its national and regional support staff.
As with all Alliance services, help is available quickly and easily by emailing our cloud team.
Using the cloud service also ensures that your data remains in Canada within a managed, secure environment.
Support
Queries, difficulties, as well as your feedback may be directed to the cloud team.
View the User Documentation
Cloud Usage Cases
Ian Milligan, Department of History, University of Waterloo
Web Archives for Longitudinal Knowledge (WALK)
Project facilitates researcher engagement with the web archive collections being built by Canadian universities in partnership with the Internet Archive and their Archive-It subscription service.
Three primary project goals:
- Improve the research infrastructure for working with web archives;
- Co-locate Canadian Archive-It collections for Canadian-based researchers, bringing data closer to our research-computing infrastructure and creating opportunity for preservation and stewardship of Canadian assets with Canadian institutions; and
- Test and develop processes to efficiently and more easily extract datasets and analyze them with other Compute Canada supported tools, reducing the barrier of technical skills required to otherwise conduct web archive-based research.
Susan Brown, Department of English, University of Guelph
Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC)
Supports a number of humanities research projects through a hosting environment featuring tools that allow researchers to work collaboratively with different types of materials and resources, such as XML documents, bibliographic records, multimedia objects, or linked open data (LOD).
Tools built into the CWRC toolkit, some of them developed by CWRC, some adopted and/or adapted open source technologies, allow the over 100 current CWRC collaborators and 22 associated research projects to edit, manipulate, analyze and publish both research output and its sources in a manner that would otherwise be inaccessible to most.
CWRC’s dedication to enabling interoperability in digital humanities research through LOD-based authority control, metadata and archiving standards, and external tool integration enables an unusual degree of collaboration and public-facing scholarship among individuals and research groups focused on the study of cultural artifacts significant to Canada.
Jon Saklofske, Department of English, Acadia University
NewRadial
A web-based digital environment for humanities research and collaboration that encourages users to occupy, search, sort, and annotate database objects in a visual field.
Designed to function as a workspace in which primary objects from remote and locally-hosted humanities-related databases can be browsed, collected, curated, correlated, and augmented by multiple users in a dynamic visual environment.
Also offers a shared space for knowledge communities in which secondary scholarship, exchange and debate can be centralized and mapped onto the primary data without deforming or destabilizing the original databases.
Reda Tafirout, Research Scientist, TRIUMF
ATLAS
The ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is studying proton-proton, proton-lead, and lead-lead collisions at very high energy. Unprecedented energy densities created are allowing researchers to study the structure of matter at much smaller scales than previously possible, to extend investigations of the fundamental forces of Nature, to understand the origin of matter, and to search for physics beyond the Standard Model ℠ of particle physics.
Experiment is collecting several Petabytes of raw data each year during the LHC operations, and is producing numerous derived and simulated datasets.
The enormous amount of data generated by ATLAS is distributed and analyzed onto the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid infrastructure (WLCG), an international network of high-performance computing centres, for which Canada is a significant contributor and a key player with a Tier‑1 centre at TRIUMF and four Tier‑2 facilities at Compute Canada.
There are nearly 3,000 researchers from 177 institutions in 38 countries participating in ATLAS.