We are witnessing today the rise of major technologies and trends that are reshaping the computational sciences landscape:
1. Cloud computing democratized on-demand access to advanced compute infrastructures. Moreover every IT artefact, from machines to storages to networks, became like software, easy to create and manipulate with standard programming languages.
2. Modern big data concepts, technologies and software tools hold the promise of enabling breakthrough discoveries in science.
3. The Open Source/Open Science movements transformed the World Wide Web into a gigantic ecosystem for data, knowledge and capabilities sharing. GitHub, R, Python, became globalized platforms for crowdsourcing data science and laying the foundation of reproducible research.
4. Cheap SoC-based computing devices (such as the raspberry Pi) made it possible for everyone to build sophisticated systems capable of interacting with the physical world and of pre-processing data. Such technologies contribute to the rise of a planetary internet of things.
The ElasticR platform (www.elasticr.com) aims at bridging the gap between all these capabilities and at making the revolutionary potential of their combination become accessible to everyone. This Tutorial will introduce cloud computing and virtual research and will present their opportunities and challenges in the computational sciences arena. It will familiarise attendees with ElasticR’s core capabilities.
