2020 Higher Education Cloud Computing Forum
| Date/Time | Session Theme | ||
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| September 11, 2020 9-10:30am PDT / 12-1:30pm EDT |
Cloud Enablement Success StoriesSession assets and recording |
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| Session | Session Title | Description | Presenters |
| Lightning | Working with Cloud reserved instances to reduce costs | Providing insight into how to analyze, forecast, acquire and review reserved instances. | Gerard Shockley – Boston University |
| Lightning | Monitor AWS with Grafana 7 | Explore using Grafana 7 to create dashboards to monitor AWS resources including billing, systems, applications, and AWS services using CloudWatch. | James Monek – Lehigh University |
| Lightning | Cloud Billing | How the University of Michigan digests, normalizes, and bills our internal users for cloud usage across the three major cloud providers. | Jim Charters – University of Michigan |
| Lightning | OTICA – Platform-on-a-Platform for GCP | Overview and demo of Stanford’s OTICA Platform-on-a-Platform for GCP driven by the vision of desired-state-computing. | Hans Jacobsen & Alan Ge – Stanford Healthcare |
| Presentation | UCF’s Remote Learning Solution to the Pandemic | Using Azure and Citrix to Provide Remote Learning Solutions for On-Campus Labs | Jeff Samek, Robert Connors & Bob Mello – University of Central Florida |
| Presentation | Notre Dame’s Accelerated VDI Madness | How Notre Dame deployed ~Applications to AWS AppStream 2.0 in 10 days scalable for 6000+ Students | James Smith & Brandon Rich – University of Notre Dame |
| Date/Time | Session Theme | ||
| October 9, 2020 9-10:30am PDT / 12-1:30pm EDT |
Cloud Community GovernanceSession assets and recording |
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| Session | Session Title | Description | Presenters |
| Presentation | Bringing order to wild free range cloud through inclusive governance | The UMBC governance structure has evolved to branch into several sub committees encompassing multicloud strategy, pricing optimization, security and compliance, and several other groups. Everyone has an equal voice in the discussion, and it has lead to a much more productive and effective mechanism for keeping consistency and transparency within the division. | Damian Doyle and Todd Haddaway – University of Maryland Baltimore County |
| Panel | Leveraging the Cloud Community | Panel discussion on a variety of community-driven efforts and resources designed to help us each get the most from our shared experiences in supporting cloud technology at our institutions. | Oren Sreebny – Internet2 – Moderator; John Bailey – Washington University in St. Louis; Bob Flynn – Indiana University; Matthew Rich – Northwestern University; Alok Vimawala – University of Michigan |
| Date/Time | Session Theme | ||
| November 13, 2020 9-10:30am PST / 12-1:30pm EST |
Research SupportSession assets and recording |
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| Session | Session Title | Description | Presenters |
| Panel | Getting the Most out of your Public Cloud Research Dollars | An overview of the NSF-funded CloudBank project and the NIH STRIDES Initiative, how they benefit academic researchers and how best to support them. | Cornelia Bailey – University of Chicago – Moderator; Brian DeMeulle – UC San Diego, Nick Weber – National Institutes of Health |
| Lightning | Cloud Research Resources to Simplify the Research Lifecycle | This session covers the approach of using a research lifecycle to publish cloud resources for researchers. | Joshua Kissee – Texas A&M University |
| Presentation | Automating the provisioning of HIPAA allied instances with Ansible and Step Functions | Our researchers wanted an easy to use, lightweight process to take advantage of large GPU backed instance in AWS. In that space, our group developed a workflow for customers to deploy their EC2 instances in any manner while still taking advantage of our configuration tool. | Matthew Chess – University of Michigan; Brandon Swickerath – University of Michigan |
| Date/Time | Session Theme | ||
| December 11, 2020 9-10:30am PST / 12-1:30pm EST |
Microsoft Team-selected Researcher + Community PresentationSession assets and recording |
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| Session | Session Title | Description | Presenters |
| Researcher Presentation | Patient-specific air flow modeling to support ventilator splitting under dire conditions | There has been a pressing need for an expansion of the ventilator capacity in response to the recent COVID19 pandemic. To help address this need, A patient-specific airflow simulation was developed to support clinical decision making for efficacious and safe splitting of a ventilator between two or more patients with varying lung compliances and tidal volume requirements. The computational model provides guidance regarding how to split a ventilator between two or more patients with differing respiratory physiologies. To address the need for fast deployment and identification of optimal patient-specific tuning, there was a need to simulate hundreds of millions of different clinically relevant parameter combinations in a short time. This task, driven by the dire circumstances, presented unique computational and research challenges. In order to support an emergency use FDA submission, a large-scale and robust cloud instance was designed and deployed within 24 hours and 800,000 compute hours were utilized in a 72 hour period. | Amanda Randles – Alfred Winborne and Victoria Stover Mordecai Assistant Professor of Biomedical Sciences – Duke University |
| Presentation | IAM in the cloud – architecture, cost and benefits | This session will explore a technical architecture for running InCommon Trusted Access Platform in the cloud along with a detailed breakdown of costs and benefits. | Bill Thompson – Lafayette College |
| Date/Time | Session Theme | ||
| January 8, 2021 9-10:30am PST / 12-1:30pm EST |
Cloud StrategySession assets and recording |
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| Session | Session Title | Description | Presenters |
| Lightning | What’s your deal: provider, consumer, or broker? | Gartner has a simple but useful way of characterizing one’s cloud strategy: provider, consumer, or broker. It proved valuable in Chicago’s recent re-articulation of its cloud strategy. If you are (re)articulating a cloud strategy, this is a useful way to get started. | Cornelia Bailey – University of Chicago |
| Lightning | Self Managed vs. Managed Service Provider | When moving enterprise applications to the cloud – Do you go it alone or select a partner to help migrate and manage? This is a story of two different institutions choosing different paths for PeopleSoft evaluating the pros/cons of each experience. | Kari Robertson – University of California, Office of the President |
| Lightning | The Power of Free: A Crisis of Opportunity and how the Cloud Saved Us | In the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, Harvard Business School Online decided to offer a bundle of lessons excerpted from their existing course as a free “Business Lessons” course. Would we even get enough people to make it worthwhile? But the real question should have been, “can we handle tens of thousands of people?” | Ryan Frazier – Harvard Business School |
| Lightning | Infrastructure Analytics at UNCG | Quick overview of the infrastructure analytics program at UNCG and what we’ve done since our birth in January 2019. Discuss how we’ve used Google Cloud Platform, and glimpse the future as we look at expanding to other services (Azure, Looker, Tableau potentially). | Nick Young – UNC Greensboro |
| Panel | Strategic Cloud Decision Making | Several schools share their cloud journeys and major projects in the cloud. | Erik Lundberg – University of Washington – Moderator; Brian Jemes – University of Idaho; James Monek – Lehigh University; Bill Thompson – Lafayette |
| Date/Time | Session Theme | ||
| February 12, 2021 9-10:30am PST / 12-1:30pm EST |
Amazon Team-selected Researcher + Community PresentationSession assets and recording |
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| Session | Session Title | Description | Presenters |
| Presentation | Managing IaC Code Rot: Terratest in Action | Infrastructure as code quickly decays without a testing strategy – to manage that CU Boulder began using Terratest in late 2019. We’ve learned a lot along the way and have established some important patterns and practices to share with our colleagues. | Jason Armbruster, Cloud Architect/Engineer & Wylie Butler, Cloud Engineer – University of Colorado |
| Researcher Presentation | Using the cloud to support research access to confidential data: The Administrative Data Research Facility | Our team was asked by OMB and the Census Bureau to build a secure environment to inform the decision-making of the Commission on Evidence-Based Policy. That effort led to the establishment of the Administrative Data Research Facility (ADRF) which was built in the AWS cloud and which has received both moderate FedRAMP certification and Authorization to Operate from the Census Bureau and the US Department of Agriculture. It has also received a 2018 Government Innovation Award. We have since evolved into a fully fledged operation, which has hosted over 600 researchers and government analysts, and enabled access to over 100 confidential datasets. | Dr. Julia Lane, Professor at the NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, at the NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress, and a NYU Provostial Fellow for Innovation Analytics |
| Date/Time | Session Theme | ||
| March 12, 2021 9-10:30am PST / 12-1:30pm EST |
Google Team-selected Researcher + Community PresentationSession assets and recording |
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| Session | Session Title | Description | Presenters |
| Presentation | Disorganized Organizations: Balancing the need for control with distributed IT | As early adopters of AWS’s Payer structure, the level of effort to implement Organizations never seemed worth it. Then, over the course of one year, Organizations (along with related technologies like Control Tower) became a critical part of Harvard’s central security strategy and simultaneously a decentralization priority for some of our partner IT organizations. Here’s how we dealt with the competing challenges. | Ben Rota – Harvard |
| Researcher Presentation | Leveraging VirtualFlow to harness the power of cloud computing to target COVID-19 proteins via ultra-large virtual screens | Drug discovery is extremely expensive, time consuming, and the initial hit compounds are often quite poor when using traditional (experimental) methods. To alleviate these problems we have developed an open-source, scalable, virtual drug discovery platform (VirtualFlow), which is able to run on the Google Cloud. It massively parallelizes the workload and can use hundreds of thousands of CPUs in parallel. Developing drugs that target multiple points in the viral life cycle could serve as a strategy to tackle the current as well as future coronavirus pandemics. Here we leverage the power of our recently developed in silico screening platform, VirtualFlow, to identify inhibitors that target SARS-CoV-2. In this unprecedented structure-based multi-target virtual screening campaign, we have used VirtualFlow to screen an average of ~1 billion molecules against each of 40 different target sites on 17 different potential viral and host targets in the cloud. | Haribabu Arthanari, Ph.D. – Assistant Professor, Department of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, Harvard Medical School, Department of Cancer Biology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute; Christoph Gorgulla – Postdoctoral Fellow – Harvard University |
| Date/Time | Session Theme | ||
| April 9, 2021 9-10:30am PDT / 12-1:30pm EDT |
Trust and SecuritySession assets and recording |
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| Session | Session Title | Description | Presenters |
| Lightning | The case for avoiding “networking” in your cloud adoption strategy | As organizations evaluate Cloud PaaS and IaaS tools for various business needs, weight should be given to services that do NOT require special networking (VPNs, Direct Connections) to be built to use them. Services that use the Internet and encrypt data in transit by default have some unique advantages that we will cover in this lightning round. | John Bailey – Washington University in St. Louis |
| Lightning | TLD TL;DR – Trust from on high | A quick ideation on how trust is derived from top level domain names (TLD) like .edu (DNSSEC/SSL Certs), the physical network infrastructure (MANRS/IRR/EduRoam), and IAM Federation (InCommon). | Sara Jeanes, Adair Thaxton, and Nick Lewis – Internet2 |
| Presentation | Securing Security for your Cloud Strategy | Maybe your security team wasn’t available at the outset of your cloud journey, or hasn’t been as attentive as you’d like. Now that you’re further along, maybe a few “things” have “happened.” You need to make up for lost time, and actively engage your security group. How should you do that? We will give you pointers on making sure you start the conversation on the right foot. In keeping with on-prem Cloud Forum expectations, there will be a brief, security-themed vocal experience. | Shelley Rossell and Cornelia Bailey – University of Chicago, Information Security |
| Panel | Protecting cloud hosted data sets | As more institutional data moves to cloud IaaS and PaaS tools across a wide range of vendor offerings, institutions must find new ways to protect their data.
This session will discuss how various institutions are going about protecting their cloud hosted datasets from ransomware attacks and/or accidental/malicious data deletion. Approaches may include customized VM backup strategies, targeted configuration of cloud data stores, WORM technologies, or other novel approaches. |
John Bailey – Washington University St. Louis – Moderator; Shelley Rossell & Cornelia Bailey – University of Chicago; Brian Pasquini – University of Pittsburgh; Nick Young – UNC Greensboro |
| May 14, 2021 9-10:30am PDT / 12-1:30pm EDT |
UnconferenceSession assets and recording |
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| Session | Session Title | Description | Presenters |
| Unconference breakouts | Concurrent breakout sessions on a range of topics and questions |
Community-driven conversations on:
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All of you in the community! |