Cornell Announces Red Cloud Computing Service

By Bio-IT World Staff  

November 2, 2011 | Cornell University has announced an on-demand research computing service running on Dell PowerEdge C servers called Red Cloud. The service is available to researchers at Cornell and other academic institutions for a set subscription fee.   

The basic offering--Red Cloud--is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) that runs Eucalyptus, the open source cloud computing platform. Subscribers have root access to virtual servers and virtual disks.   

Red Cloud with MATLAB is a Software as a Service (SaaS) that runs MATLAB Distributed Computing Server and features NVIDIA GPUs. Subscribers program applications on their desktops using their licensed copy of Parallel Computing Toolbox and then scale up to Red Cloud with MATLAB using MATLAB Distributed Computing Server.  

Industry may access Red Cloud as an IaaS through Cornell Corporate Program memberships.  

Users are charged per subscription, which is equal to 8,585 core hours, and users can buy more than one subscription at a time. Red Cloud subscriptions cost $750 for academic users outside of Cornell and Red Cloud with MATLAB subscriptions cost $1,200 for academic users outside of Cornell. Users can use their subscriptions, or core hours, at their own pace and they do not expire.    

First subscriptions include 50GB storage. Users can create Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volumes up to 1TB in increments of 1GB. Each EBS volume is a virtual disk that can be attached to or detached from a cloud virtual server on demand.   

Advantages of the system include predictable, reproducible, and reliable performance with no hidden costs, and have fast access to data via 10Gb Ethernet in and out of the cloud at no additional charge. Expert consulting is available for an hourly fee.   

For more information, visit http://www.cac.cornell.edu/redcloud/.