1. Who are the target users for CloudBank?

CloudBank is available to any U.S. researcher or educator through the ACCESS and NAIRR Pilot programs.

2. What resources, services does CloudBank provide?

CloudBank provides information, education, training, and allocations for commercial clouds -- currently, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Information, education, and training resources are available to anyone in the research and education communities. Projects that receive allocations via the ACCESS and NAIRR Pilot programs will also receive additional services, as described below. 

3. How do I gain access to CloudBank?

Please see our Get Access page.

4. How can I stay up-to-date with CloudBank progress and activities?

Subscribe to the CloudBank email list on our news page.  

5. Who are the partners in the CloudBank project?

CloudBank is established via an NSF Cooperative Agreement with the San Diego Supercomputer Center and the Information Technology Services Division at UC San Diego, the University of Washington eScience Institute, and UC Berkeley Division of Data Science and Information.

6. Which cloud providers will be available?

Currently, CloudBank provides access to Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure. Others may become available over time.

7. Will cloud resources acquired through CloudBank bear indirect costs?

No. CloudBank is managed by UC San Diego (UCSD), which does not charge indirect costs (IDC) on cloud resources. While some universities apply IDC to cloud resource line items in project budgets, UCSD was among the first campuses in the nation—along with the University of Washington—to adopt a policy of not assessing IDC on commercial cloud resources.

8. What information, education, and training resources and services does CloudBank provide?

Please see our Training page.

9. I am preparing a resource request and wish to budget for commercial cloud computing resources. How I can estimate the associated cloud computing costs?

CloudBank recommends using the following calculators that the cloud computing providers have made available:

10. How will I access these services?

The CloudBank user portal is the single point of access for users, giving them an on-ramp to cloud providers and access to materials and tools to support their research and education outcomes.  It provides access to help desk support, training and documentation, a catalog that summarizes important cloud provider features, allocation processing and management, and cost monitoring and accounting.

11. How do I cite and/or acknowledge CloudBank?

To cite CloudBank in publications, please use:

Michael Norman, Vince Kellen, Shava Smallen, Brian DeMeulle, Shawn Strande, Ed Lazowska, Naomi Alterman, Rob Fatland, Sarah Stone, Amanda Tan, Katherine Yelick, Eric Van Dusen, and James Mitchell. 2021. CloudBank: Managed Services to Simplify Cloud Access for Computer Science Research and Education. In Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing (PEARC '21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 45, 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1145/3437359.3465586.

In addition, please include the name of the cloud(s) and the following acknowledgment:

"This work used [cloud-names] thru the CloudBank project, which is supported by National Science Foundation grant #1925001."