Research Toolkits
Research Toolkits
Research Toolkits is a new service that enables Duke faculty researchers and their designees self-service on-demand access to short-term Virtual Machine (VM) environments and scratch storage in 100 Gigabyte chunks free of charge each semester.
The VM portion of the Research Toolkits service is called RAPID (RAPID = Research Accelerating, Preconfigured, Individual, Dynamic Machines) and will provide researchers with sandbox VMs along with Data Commons scratch storage space. We expect this service to become a popular way to quickly deploy VM "sandboxes" to test new software before scaling the systems up on the research compute cluster.
The Research Toolkits site also allows faculty to define roles and projects - this allows per-project management of access to IT resources. The long-term goal of this project is to expand the service beyond VMs and storage to encompass data sets and other services.