The Digital Research Alliance of Canada (the Alliance) cloud service responds to researchers who have a need for greater configurability, availability, durability or portability than may be available on non-cloud systems or traditional HPC clusters.
By using virtual machines (VMs) configurable through your cloud account, you can customize the computing environment to meet your unique needs. The Alliance cloud can be used to build portals and platforms to share data as well as perform computationally intensive work.
Who should use the Alliance cloud service?
- Researchers who need continuously running jobs or services, rather than batch processing.
- Researchers who want to develop web portals or platforms.
- Researchers who need VMs, need to control their own operating system, and want the ability to customize software stacks.
- Researchers who need to build specialized virtual clusters for experimentation.
UBC ARC also offers direct support for the use of the Alliance cloud service.
Using the Alliance cloud service also ensures that your data remains in Canada within a managed, secure environment. Those with an active Alliance account can find out more and apply for access on the Alliance website.