2.1 Research Platforms in the Cloud

Many advances in science are being achieved not by spending hours in a laboratory or by examining the skies through a telescope, but rather through analyses conducted on large volumes of data. Researchers struggle to keep up with the continuing data deluge and the overhead required to address it (Hey and Trefethen 2003) in terms of the time, people, funding, and coordination required to manage the growing information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure. What is needed in much of the global research community is technology to reduce the time to new insights, enabling researchers to spend more time on investigation and discovery instead of fighting ICT-related issues. Computer-based technologies are increasingly used as the tools for managing, processing, and visualizing the mountains of information. Requirements to support research are more complex than simply providing easy access to cheap storage and fast processors. As researchers address increasingly complex problems, collaboration across disciplines is becoming essential, and interdisciplinary work is being pursued more enthusiastically than ever. At the same time, domainspecific communities of experts are being formed to attack grand research challenges, such as through the major e-science and cyberinfrastructure projects in the United Kingdom and the United States, as discussed earlier in this book. However, despite the increasing demand for software to support virtual research teams and collaborations, it is proving difficult to build such platforms from scratch, as most research groups have chosen to do. Meanwhile, social networking (eg, through …