A Hybrid Cloud Architecture for a Social Science Research Computing Data Center

Research computing in the social sciences requires access to statistical software and quantitative tools that perform embarrassingly parallel computation at moderate scale, large memory to fit entire data sets, and secure storage for potentially confidential data. The Research Computing Environment (RCE) was designed as a three-tier system to satisfy these requirements in a transparent manner. We extend the RCE to use cloud resources while maintaining the transparency of the resources from the user. This paper describes this use case and highlights the significant resource management and networking decisions made when designing and implementing a hybrid cloud architecture for a research computing environment to support the social sciences.