Global Science Connection

GSC is a organization in it’s startup phase offering affordable and automated cloud resources to the scientific community. Affordable trough grants and private funding, automated trough virtualization. We offer new approaches to create and manage production environments for scientific data and simulated research. Creating easy and intuitive platforms where scientists and student researchers can analyse, store and share there work.

We offer a cloud based working environment tuned and specialized for big data research. Answering the need from scientists and researchers to interact in a new and efficient way with the ever growing complexity of scientific research.

Our main service will be the Open Source cloud which is targeted on centralizing data science and to simplify access to every kind of dataset and computational resources.
Minimizing setup time to have your analysis done alongside with safe and long time storage of your datasets, makes for an ideal platform to centralize computational science.

We are looking for enthusiast students, scientists and researchers to actively use and contribute to the development of a first Proof-of-Concept (POC) cloud environment. We need people from various scientific branches to tell us the requirements (bot principal and technical) you need to be able to actively do your research. We will try to meet these requirements as best as possible so you will be able to test your cloud environment and support us in developing your custom research platform.

Why would you participate in such a project? You will be given free resources to test and discover new and more efficient ways of interacting with your work. In exchange for these resources being free we ask of you to actively give feedback, test and help improve you personal custom made environment within the POC cloud. Future advantages will be available for people who have participated to the project from it’s first days.

If you feel interested in issueing a request to participate please have a look at our How to Contribute page.

Run virtual instances of your software and enjoy all the benefit’s which come with a cloud environment.  Your research labs will run in a secure and isolated environment with access to a standard OpenStack API. Make virtual machine or data clones anytime, take snapshots and share your work with partners.

Once the data for your research is safely stored and the software that will work it is configured, it is time to do what really matters. We will offer a substantiation amount of computational resources to participants.

Creating and managing analytic environments should be as easy as a few clicks away, the same goes for more larger multi node setups. As every scientific study requires vastly different research methods, these environments needs specific configuration and fine tuning for each project.

Automation will be key, so our focus will be on deployment. We will build a community based platform where expertise, software and configurations are shared, building our knowledge base.

As many datasets keep on growing in size it becomes increasingly difficult to store, backup and share this data. Therefore new platforms have to be build to releav people from having to manage these pools.

Imagine not to have to worry about backups, data integrity or power failures at affordable prices. This is one of the project goals.

Apply for resources.

Not everyone will be allowed to Request for Resources. One will have to comply to some requirements before you can use the proof-of-concept cloud at this first stage of the project. We only have limited resources for now so we will have to filter out the most interesting projects. Have a look at our Request for Resources page to find out more.

Use the available resources.

By using the available resources and actively reporting you help the general development of the platform. There will be guides available on how to use the cloud alongside with individual guidance in setting up your personal environment. Together with us and the community we can build and fine tune your configurations step by step.

Configure and Share.

By building your own custom environment you can help others by make it available within the cloud. Researchers and students can then use your pre build and configured environment to save time. We also ask of members to participate in answering questions from others members and aid them in troubleshooting.

Develop.

Helping in developing this project can be done without writing any line of code. Writing guides or create how-to documents helps a lot in developing a knowledge base. Writing down your experience and suggesting a better or more efficient approach not only helps others, but will also improve your own experience.