Re: Debian Med server available for Cloud Computing?
Hello Ntino,
Ntino Krampis wrote:
> Stephen,
>
> Amazon Web Services provides small grants (as compute credit)
> through their education and research programs:
>
> http://aws.amazon.com/education/
>
>> >From experience I have with our own work with Cloud BioLinux
> (http://tinyurl.com/ycxuau2, http://tinyurl.com/kmdpuh) projects that
> might not fit the funded categories exactly - like a linux distro -
> still can be funded.
I followed your advise and applied - your reply was what I needed. Many
thanks. This was the project's description in the application:
"Users of Debian and Ubuntu have joined forces to extend the
distributions for the benefits of researchers in Medical Informatics and
Bioinformatics. An enormous wealth of Open Source software was packaged
and thus became readily available to be embedded in the various
scientific or administrative challenges.
This AWS Research Grant shall help elucidating the question, how the
community can share the effort of maintaining public databases and their
indexes for the already packaged tools. While this is e.g. of little
concern for large bioinformatics groups, the sole bioinformatician
embedded in a wet-lab environment cannot spare the resources - while the
hardware is cheap, time and bandwidth are not. With AWS, the storage for
databases and indices can be shared, cleanly kept aside from the
instances on which respective research tasks would be run or offered to
be run via the web. Thus, AWS increases the power of small research
groups and start- ups, both for the resources and the collective
expertise of the community.
It should be stressed that Debian Med is run solely by volunteers. Of
these, many are researchers themselves, some are in direct contact with
the developers of the packaged software, a few packages are provided by
the developers themselves. The Research Grant may allow the packaged
knowledge of the Linux distributions to become active knowledge for
researchers."
Hm. As much as Debian and Ubuntu are used on AWS, the text should be
sufficient to get the idea across.
> You basically need a very small amount (100$ or less) to create a VM
> on amazon and maintain it for 3 or more years (their prices per GB per
> month are very low).
I had a Debian Med image on there myself for a few months. But those who
do the work should not also pay for it, I felt.
> Of course people that might want to run Debian Med apps on Amazon will
> have to pay and rent compute time. But scientists for example who
> have research funds might not have a problem using Amazon, and wanting
> to pay for having stable and scalable compute available.
Right. But the closer you get from anonymous model cell cultures towards
analysing data of living individuals, the more data security becomes an
issue - and may even prevent an active contribution. This is when I
think that we want to have something that can be run on local machines,
too. I am mostly after the sharing of skills, less after the mere
resources. Those who could profit alone from downloading new images,
might be interested to communicate their smaller local deltas to the
public image back more easily than if it was all on AWS only. I admit to
be also thinking of reaching industrial groups more easily, but this is
just a hunch.
> Plus Amazon is widely known, so I think you get much more exposure of
> the debian-med VM you's put up there. Of course you can still have a
> server with Eucalyptus for people who don't have the funds to rent
> compute from Amazon, and since the two cloud platforms have compatible
> APIs, there's not a problem to port applications between the two.
I support what you are saying. As much as I respect Amazon for what they
have achieved, we as supporters of Free software should not render
ourselves too dependent on Amazon (or Google or ...). To have a Debian
Med VM staying closely with Debian Med somehow, would also be something
of a symbolic act. This is another motivation for me to have a
eucalyptus.debian.org machine. Then, just like you suggest, users of AWS
or some local Eucalyptus installation can fetch updates ad libitum and
use the commercial AWS as a seemless extension of their local world.
> If anyone is in Boston, MA area in July 7-8, we have a codefest around
> those topics, and would love to meet fellow hackers:
> http://open-bio.org/wiki/Codefest_2010
I am aware of it and would very much like to go, indeed.
Again, have many thanks for your stimulus.
Steffen
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