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About NERC

We are currently in the pilot phase of the project and are focusing on developing the technology to make it easy for researchers to take advantage of a suite of services (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) that are not readily available today. This includes:

  1. The creation of the building blocks needed for production cloud services

  2. Begin collaboration with Systems Engineers from other institutions with well established RC groups

  3. On-board select proof of concept use cases from institutions within the MGHPCC consortium and other institutions within Massachusetts

The longer term objectives will be centered around activities that will focus on:

  1. Engaging with various OpenStack communities by sharing best practices and setting standards for deployments

  2. Connecting regularly with the Mass Open Cloud (MOC) leadership to understand when new technologies they are developing with RedHat, Inc. – and as part of the new NSF funded Open Cloud Testbed – might be ready for adoption into the production NERC environment

  3. Broadening the local deployment team of NERC to include partner universities within the MGHPCC consortium.

NERC-overview Figure 1: NERC Overview

NERC production services (red) stand on top of the existing NESE storage services (blue) that are built on the strong foundation of MGHPCC (green) that provides core facility and network access. The Innovation Hub (grey) enables new technologies to be rapidly adopted by the NERC or NESE services. On the far left (purple) are the Research and Learning communities which are the primary customers of NERC. As users proceed down the stack of production services from Web-apps, that require more technical skills, the Cloud Facilitators (orange) in the middle guide and educate users on how to best use the services.

For more information, view NERC's concept document.