Research

Principal Investigators, Researchers, Graduate students and related research employees are looking to Cloud Providers like Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft’s Azure and Google’s GCP to further research goals.

Cloud Providers can alleviate bottlenecks in on premise HPC environments, provide access to GPUs otherwise not available locally or provide solutions for time-sensitive analyses or local laptop/compute limitations.

UCSB’s Campus Cloud Landing Zone (LZ) environment provides accounts in AWS, Azure and GCP with significant discounts that meet UC Policies and practices requirements. Using a UC-authorized cloud service provider can help keep your data safe, meet federal and state regulations, reduce risk and access other advantages. Please see more about the LZ and its features and benefits - https://docs.cloud.ucsb.edu/

Cloud Team Consulting

UCSB’s Cloud Team has worked with a number of research groups on campus to assist and enable their research. In particular we have been utilizing a formal Cloud Intern program to provide UCSB students, often majoring in CS, Computer Engineering, and Data Science, to help define and enable research efforts in the Cloud

Please contact the Cloud Team for more information. See the FAQ below for contact information.

AWS Benefits

There are some additional benefits of using the UCSB Campus Cloud for AWS.

  • We receive a significant discount across all AWS services and an additional discount for S3 Storage services.
  • The Campus Cloud environment includes solutions for secure network communication back to campus (currently via a VPN tunnel)
  • We receive Enterprise Support from AWS for all of our accounts.
  • The Campus Cloud environment includes Controls and Logging that protect the Account.

Amazon Research Awards (ARA)

The awards program offers unrestricted funds and AWS Promotional Credits to support research at academic institutions and non-profit organizations in areas that align with our mission to advance customer-obsessed science.

UCSB research awarded ARA credits are expected to create a new Campus Cloud LZ account or migrate an existing AWS personal account to access ARA credits.

  • https://www.amazon.science/research-awards

FAQ - Research

How do I contact the Cloud Team ?

Please see “Questions/Contacts” at the bottom of this page → https://docs.cloud.ucsb.edu/

What are Cloud “personal accounts” ?

A Cloud personal account is an account in AWS, Azure or GCP that uses a personal credit card as the payment mechanism. Personal accounts are generally NOT provisioned in UCSB’s Campus Cloud Landing Zone and therefore do not receive any of the benefits mentioned above. Use of a personal account with a UCSB email address (ucsbnetid@ucsb.edu) may require a review of the account to ensure UC policy and practices are being followed.

What is the issue with using a UCSB email address with a Cloud personal account ?

Your personal account may be subject to review or audit to ensure it meets UC policies and practices. A Cloud personal account should not have a UCSB email address associated with it.

Do you already have an AWS personal account (personal vs UCSB Campus Cloud LZ) ?

If you already have an AWS personal account, check the associated email address for that account. You have two options. 1) Migrate the personal account to the Campus Cloud LZ 2) Change the associated email address so it is NOT using a UCSB email address.

Migrating the personal account will provide you with numerous features and benefits including significant discounts.

How do I migrate a Cloud personal account to the Campus Cloud LZ ?

We regularly migrate personal accounts to the Campus Cloud LZ. Contact the Cloud Team to get started.. Please see “Questions/Contacts” at the bottom of this page - https://docs.cloud.ucsb.edu/