RapidCompute for Research Community

Abstract

Cloud computing provides a way to use computing resources as a utility on pay-as-you-go bases. It is getting popular day by day in almost every industry mainly due to two of its benefits - accessibility from anywhere and no investment on hardware resources. From a large organization to an individual, everyone can be benefited from the cloud computing to perform different activities from business to research. Cloud computing is also expected to be a great support in research particularly when high power computing resources are required for some time/experiments but not all the time. Instead of buying/upgrading existing resources for a few experiments, it is better to use cloud for those tasks. Cloud computing provides elasticity so a researcher may extend or shrink the resources as per experiment’s needs and pay for those resources only for the time they were used. Many companies provide their clouds that include Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, etc. Recently, a Pakistani company, CyberNet, has introduced the first Pakistani cloud, the RapidCompute, which mainly focuses corporate market. This paper presents the comparison of RapidCompute with the well-known Amazon EC2 particularly for individuals or research activities. It is proposed to the CyberNet to consider the individuals particularly the research community of Pakistan that could motivate them to use Cloud for research activities.