Case Study: A Low Cost Private Cloud for HPC Cancer Research

In this video, Dirk Petersen from the The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and SwiftStack’s Robert Minnear present a case study on using the cloud for cancer research. This use case focuses on avoiding pitfalls and building an OpenStack Swift cluster that makes sense for in HPC research environments.

When implementing storage chargebacks, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center wanted to offer researchers an alternative storage solution that would not cost more than AWS Glacier. It had to be easy to manage, scale to many petabytes, survive the loss of an entire datacenter and, deliver predictable performance. As a bonus they wanted to integrate with cloud computing efforts and facilitate collaborations with other institutions.