The University of Canterbury (UC) has become the first tertiary institute in New Zealand to use a cloud infrastructure for large scale data analysis.
This will allow researchers to carry out analysis that would have previously required any number of computers—ranging from several right through to hundreds.
The updated cloud means more than 10,000 of off-site computers will now be able to instantly scale-up to meet project demands as needed, with analysis taking as little time as possible.
Funding for the new cloud system was secured by Senior Lecturer Raazesh Sainudiin, who was successful in applications to the Databricks Academic Partners Program and Amazon Web Services Educate.
The cloud system is already being used for a new course “Special Topics in Scalable Data Science” which has seen a research cluster with thousands of computer nodes running Apache Spark—an engine for big data processing—tapping into the infrastructure created with funding from the grants.
Sainudiin said the new system will give UC the potential to become an Australasian leader in large scale data analysis.