Category I: CloudBank 2: Accelerating Science and Engineering Research in the Commercial Cloud

CloudBank 2 is a service-based resource that brokers access to commercial cloud resources and builds upon the infrastructure developed by CloudBank. Its flexible multi-cloud infrastructure has been in operation since August 2020, supporting Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. CloudBank 2 empowers researchers to explore and access a wealth of these rapidly evolving commercial cloud resources.

Commercial clouds play an important role in AI research, development, and education, as well as supporting high-performance computing, networking research, edge computing, quantum computing, and a wide variety of other scientific, engineering, medical, and business applications. Through its Education Hub and outreach activities, CloudBank 2 aims to provide access to advanced computing resources and contribute to the continuing U.S. national leadership in "Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics" (STEM) education, training, and preparation of the U.S. workforce.

This mission is fully consistent with U.S. national goals towards "increasing the economic competitiveness of the United States," "advancing the health and welfare of the American public," "supporting the national defense of the United States," and "developing an American STEM workforce that is globally competitive," pursuant to 42 U.S.C. §1862.

CloudBank 2 builds upon and enhances CloudBank's three core research and education services: a CloudBank Portal that makes it easy for researchers to access and manage their cloud accounts, share access with collaborators, and monitor their spending; Financial Operations that pay monthly cloud vendor bills and relieve users of the burden to manage financial accounts or use their own credit cards; and an Education Hub based on an open-source stack for teaching on the commercial cloud, which has facilitated interactive computing for students and educators by offering an easy on-ramp for data science education. In addition, CloudBank 2: 1) supports projects that require access to regulated data; 2) supports AI educators with an enhanced Education Hub; 3) provides portal tools to support communities and science gateways; 4) facilitates data transfer and interoperability with other ACCESS resources; 5) integrates new commercial cloud vendors to provide innovative capabilities and potential additional cost savings to the science and engineering community; and 6) facilitates cost and security compliance management of commercial cloud resources.

A team of experts assists researchers in harnessing the full potential of commercial cloud services to advance multiple research domains through the business hour help desk, cloud clinics, training, user documentation, curated research workflows, and application support.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.