In this session, we will hear directly from NSA and CERN about how research and government organizations are benefitting from OpenStack. Mark Collier will make a brief introduction, followed by two presentations from an NSA cloud architect and physicist at the University of Victoria:
OpenStack at the National Security Agency (NSA)
Speaker: Nathanael Burton, NSA
What does "cloud" mean at NSA and a discussion of how OpenStack fits into the NSA ecosystem. How a small team drove massive process and efficiency change to become one of the NSA's largest hosting platforms. Fostering an environment where creativity and development risk are balanced within the bounds of existing enterprise processes and priorities. Methods for avoiding the "tragedy of the commons".
Clouds in High Energy Physics
Speaker: Randall Sobie, Institute of Particle Physics and University of Victoria
The presentation will describe the motivation for using cloud computing in high energy physics research. In particular, the talk will focus on the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) located at the CERN LCEaboratory in Geneva which recently found evidence for the Higgs boson. We will highlight the challenge of analyzing the LHC data using computing resources distributed around the world. We will show that clouds can be used in a number of ways in high energy physics and describe our experiences in this rapidly changing field of computing.
