New cloud service for researchers

Calcul Québec and the Compute Canada Federation are pleased to announce the launch of the Beluga Cloud, its new cloud service.

“A cloud service provides a flexibility that is not always possible with traditional compute servers,”  explains Alain Veilleux, Lead of the Calcul Québec cloud services team. “With this addition of about 112 execution servers and nearly 2 petabytes of redundant internal storage, the Béluga cloud will help support much of the specific needs of the research community.”

The Béluga cloud is an IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) for projects that require a customized software environment with a public user interface. Users can create virtual machines tailored to their research needs and install the operating systems, servers and applications they need. With these advantages however comes great responsibility: research groups must be aware of the security risks and be knowledgeable enough to manage their virtual environments.

Use cases for cloud environments include:

• sharing research data,
• collecting data via a portal,
• providing access to research software through an interactive portal.

Like all the other services offered by Calcul Québec, the Béluga cloud is part of an independent infrastructure located in Quebec which fosters an important expertise for provincial and national development.

The Beluga Cloud adds to the Compute Canada Federation’s cloud infrastructure (Arbutus, Graham, East, Cedar).

If you think this service can profit your research project, find out more on the introductory page about our cloud services.

For more information, write to cloud@computecanada.ca.