Inkspot releases cloud computing platform for universities
January 6, 2012
Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Charlie Osborne.
Inkspot has released a portable web-based platform designed to assist universities in data analysis and providing secure cloud storage for researchers.
Co-founded by Professor Paul Watson of Newcastle University in 2008, Inkspot is also known as ‘e-Science central’ . The project has developed a platform based on investigation in to the improvement of scientific and research institutions. It provides services targeted at various cloud infrastructures such as Amazon EC2, Windows Azure and Eucalyptus.
Red Hat, a provider of global open source solutions, has collaborated on the project. The two organisations have tailored the Inkspot platform to adhere particularly to the needs of the academic scientific and research community…
Merging the Inkspot.co platform with Red hat permits application builds to scale — reducing the cost of construction for both private and public cloud solutions.
Dr. Mark Little, the Red Hat senior director of engineering said:
“We are collaborating with Inkspot because JBoss technology can directly support the research objectives of the project. It provides Inkspot with the infrastructure on which research and development can thrive, without concerns over security or scalability. Individuals and organisations can focus on R&D without technology distractions.”
The web-based platform allows universities to store and analyse data, run workflow controls and share their work with other individuals on the network. Students can complete projects and submit them online, but it can also be used as a research tool for universities on a local and international level.
University lecturers will have access to student results through the cloud, allowing them to update and track figures as required — and also to run statistics on the data with greater efficiency.
The University of Sunderland is the first to sign up with the platform, currently contracted for a minimum three-year period. It is hoped in the longer term that other universities will implement the platform for their own institutions.
Other clients of the platform include SimMarTec, Online Video CV, and uBrands.