A cloud – based research environment for a North – American medical research institution

One-point management and processing data in a cloud. The portal made it possible to gain access to powerful cloud-based computing facilities, and use a wide variety of research software in conjunction with them. A user could configure any of these applications from the portal.

Easy user administration. The Research Environment portal included the Admin part allowing the client’s system administrator manage users, their organization units, and permissions. The system administrator can also modify an available computing resource.

Commonality and convenience. Due to the clustered storage of user data implemented by the project team, the data can be stored in a variety of formats as required by the different software applications deployed in the cloud. A user can view data from any computer, and simultaneously modify data on multiple computers.

As the wide variety of the software deployed in the cloud required that data be stored in the different corresponding formats, designing the architecture of the solution took some additional effort. An additional architecture-related challenge was also created by the need to provide access to multiple software applications, while ensuring a high level of security.

Some other technologically challenging tasks included developing the intricate instance cost estimation functionality, and a capability that allowed the user to pause running instances of any of the supported applications. As the client did not have any technical experts who could facilitate Envion’s interactions with them, our project team had to resolve any project-related issues by communicating directly with the client’s senior management.

Despite the above complications, our project team delivered all constituent parts of the solution’s functionality in full compliance with the client’s corresponding requirements and deadlines. The solution itself was designed for one-point management and processing of this data in a cloud. The portal makes it possible to gain access to powerful cloud-based computing facilities, and use a wide variety of research software in conjunction with them. The software that is deployed in the cloud includes a broad array of Python-, Java-, C-based and other industry-standard statistical analysis tools. The user can configure any of these applications from the portal.

Also, the Research Environment portal includes the Admin part that allows the client’s system administrator to manage users, their organization units, and permissions. The system administrator can also modify an available computing resource.

Due to the clustered storage of user data implemented by the project team, the data can be stored in a variety of formats as required by the different software applications deployed in the cloud. The users can view all their data from any one of their computers, and simultaneously modify data on multiple computers.