Sid Futures

Last Updated: October 2020

Sid 1.0 was our vision of  an approachable secure public cloud research computing cluster.   We had hopes that it would be the next generation replacement for the IQSS Research Computing Environment (RCE).  Early this year an opportunity came our way which changed our focus.  For now we've put on hold our aspirations for secure computing in the public cloud. The Sid team goal of making secure High Performance Computing (HPC) more accessible through improvements to the user experience under the Sid banner remains!

 

Collaboration is a Win-Win

 

Early this year the Sid team started a long term collaboration with the FAS Research Computing team.  It's turned out to be a great match as the teams have complimentary operations and secure HPC computing experience and the organizations a compatible vision.   

Through this collaboration our teams will:

  • Create a multi-tenant Secure Environment (FASSE) within the FAS Research Cluster and migrate our Sid 1.0 and RCE projects into it.
  • Create an improved and unified Harvard researcher user experience (UX) for interacting with the FAS RC HPC Environment.
  • Combine talents to provide great support, particularly to Social Scientists and other researchers who haven't historically had easy access to HPC resources.

There is a very clear win for the Sid team in this.  With this collaboration the IQSS teams will continue providing support and will work with FAS RC on operations tasks. However we will no longer have the sole responsibility for ongoing maintenance and upkeep of our own HPC cluster and secure public cloud offering. This in turn, will help to shift cycles significantly to proactive work.

The Sid team will drive the improvement of the user experience, the incorporation of new tools into the FASSE environment, and participate with colleagues throughout the university and research community on open source efforts, such as Dataverse and Open OnDemand. 

In particular we are looking forward to working with Open OnDemand team who's efforts have already gained a large following in the HPC community.

 

Current Happenings

 

As of this update, our team is preparing for the migration of  our RCE and Sid users to the new FAS RC secure multi-tenant environment.  The creation of this environment codenamed: FASSE (Faculty of Arts and Sciences Secure Environment) is currently the focus of our FAS RC counterparts.

Concurrently we are laying the design groundwork for an improved user experience. 

 

More Information 

 

More information is available on the Sid Roadmap