The National Science Foundation is sponsoring a workshop focusing on “Next Generation Cloud Research Infrastructure,” on November 11-12, 2019, in Princeton, NJ. The workshop will immediately precede the ACM HotNets 2019 workshop at the same location.

Lucas Sterzinger's capstone (undergraduate senior) research project at the University of North Dakota (UND) investigated how cloud computing services could be used to run weather models, specifically for small businesses.

In this article, Lucas summarizes his project, which looked at whether hosting servers in the cloud a reasonable alternative to buying physical hardware to be located on-site.

With funding from the National Science Foundation, the Unidata program is collaborating with researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the university community to organize a workshop on “Modeling Research in the Cloud.” The workshop will include speakers and participants from academia, government, and the private sector (including commercial Cloud vendors), and will be held 31 May - 2 June 2017 at the UCAR campus in Boulder, Colorado. Funding is available to sponsor attendance at the workshop by five graduate students.

In November of 2015, Unidata released CloudIDV, a cloud-optimized version of the IDV. Since then, our community has expressed interest in the underlying application-streaming technology. In the words of one developer, "We all have legacy software that we'd like to support on new devices." Motivated by this observation, we have released CloudStream. CloudStream allows a developer or scientist to easily package software and/or a custom linux environment in such a way that it becomes ready for use in the cloud. Thanks to Docker, building software for use with CloudStream is no more difficult than configuring and building software in any standard Linux environment.

A fully-interactive IDV in a web browser.

As part of the Unidata Program Center's continuing investigations into the use of Unidata technologies in cloud computing environments, UPC developers have created a version of the Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) that runs in a Docker container and displays the IDV interface in a web browser.

The CloudIDV container can be run on any computer that has the Docker containerization software installed — currently linux, MacOSX, and Windows versions of Docker are available. If you are already running Docker on your own system, you can easily experiment with the CloudIDV container. If you're new to Docker, read on for details on how to get started.

Unidata has developed a version of the IDV dubbed "CloudIDV." CloudIDV is designed for application streaming, allowing an instance of the IDV to be accessed via tablet, mobile phone, or even via a browser. These features are enabled through a fairly new technology called containerization. There are several containerization technologies in use; for CloudIDV we are using Docker.