Internet2 Taps Two Research teams for Final Phase of E-CAS Project

WASHINGTON, D.C., Sept. 3, 2020 – Internet2 confirmed the selection of two research teams using an external academic review panel for the second and final phase of the Exploring Clouds for Acceleration of Science (E-CAS) project that was first announced in November 2018. The second phase of the E-CAS project builds on lessons learned and leading practices that have been identified by the six research proposals that were selected in March 2019 with the goal of producing a deeper understanding of the use of cloud computing in accelerating scientific discoveries. "The first phase of the E-CAS project supported six teams to develop their computational workflows and test them at scale, and the results from all teams were very impressive," said Howard Pfeffer, president and CEO, Internet2. "Now in the second phase, the teams from MIT and SUNY Downstate have the opportunity to build on their technological achievements using the commercial cloud platforms with a focus on the scientific outcomes of their work." The research team from MIT has developed a range of new tools and code to take advantage of the newest graphical processing units (GPUs) and field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to perform accelerated machine learning tasks in Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud using remote procedure calls from their main workflows running on high-performance clusters at MIT and FermiLab.