Research Computing Services currently hosts an 80-node OpenStack-based private cloud in the West Cambridge Data Centre, for the provision of Infrastructure-as-a-Service compute, networking and storage resources to support research computing applications and virtual laboratories.

Principal Investigators, research group members and group IT support staff will be able to submit an application here to rent a portion of the available cloud resources, on which to build their own research computing applications without needing to first provision physical hardware in their home department.

The Research Cloud is currently comprised of 80 Intel Haswell Xeon E5-2680v3-based virtual machine hypervisors, connected via a Mellanox 50Gb Ethernet interconnect and a 10Gb connection to the Cambridge University Data Network.

Storage for running virtual machines can be allocated from a large Ceph cluster and mounted directly on virtual machines as block devices, in much the same manner as Elastic Block Storage in the Amazon cloud ecosystem.