Free Computing Resources for your Research
Open Science Pool is a portal that allows you to access the resources on the Open Science Grid (OSG). OSG is a platform (or a framework, if you will) used by large scientific flows. How large? Think 100s of terabytes per each flow. A flow is an interchangeable term for a data transfer.
CERN, LHC, ATLAS experiments use OSG heavily to transfer their data between university computing centers, research labs, super computing centers- all connected via a network. OSG as a platform does not deal with networks side of research. Instead, it is an application layer framework that can be accessed by scientists at the institutions that are part of the OSG.
If you are a student at a secondary level institution, you can access the oSG resources by logging in using your CILogon (institutional log in) from this page.
COSMOS and, POWDER are city-wide remote testbeds for research. What is a city-wide testbed? A collection of programmable servers, IoT devices, routers, switches and, other network elements spread over a city.
FABRIC is spread over the US connecting several major cities. It is not different from COSMOS and POWDER except that it is spread across cities instead of a single city.
All three testbeds need registration and you would use your institution affiliated email (“.edu”). Here are the registration links for each: (i) FABRIC, (ii) COSMOS, and (iii) POWDER.
Each of the testbeds are complex ecosystems and present a deep learning curve but working with them is well worth the time, for most networking and computing related researches. You can find the DOIs here: FABRIC, POWDER, and COSMOS.
Amazon AWS provides some minimal credits to use their cloud computing resources (virtual machines, proprietary machine learning models, etc.)
You can register for free by filling out this application form.
As of this writing AWS Educate is an active program but AWS might stop this program and direct the focus towards AWS Academy. AWS Academy is only available for registration on institution basis. In other words, someone from your university or college needs to apply for AWS Academy. The credits to students at the institution are normally granted in a couple of weeks.
Google Collab provides you a fast web IDE (Jupyter) all for free! You can even connect your google drive to the collab- which is useful for saving/uploading your code to/from your drive.
Collab may be one of the best tools to do your coding for assignments, projects, and your research. As a cherry on top, it has easy access to a several machine learning models and even open source datasets.
