The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Federated Cloud Workshop to be held at the Holiday Inn in Gaithersburg, MD on March 20th and 21st 2018.

As the Open Research Cloud Alliance (ORCA) effort is highly aligned with the NIST initiative, ORCA collaborated towards the development of this workshop and its agenda and will be discussing their federation efforts. The federation of research clouds is essential and necessary enabling technology for the development and translation of innovations in IoT, high-performance computing, distributed big-data analytics, and global scientific collaboration. These highly aligned efforts will be spotlighted at this unique two-day workshop that will provide participants with an update on the cloud federation and applications of federation within the global scientific research community.

ORCA is a collaboration of the international community supporting scientific research computing toward a cloud-agnostic approach to federate all sorts of clouds with a focus on the federation of data, identity, security, shared compute and storage; and an interoperable cloud services management platform. Additional topics of discussion include

• 1. Relative focus on policy vs. technical capabilities
• 2. Dealing with concerns about loss of control and lock-in
• 3. Data ownership/sovereignty and security
• 4. Protocols for access and authorized use (across multiple political jurisdictions)
• 5. Shared use, interoperability, mobility and provisioning
• 6. Addressing the combination of cultural and technical barriers to effective collaboration

The agenda for the meeting will cover a discussion of NIST/IEEE P2302, the ORCA initiative and the work of data management groups as well as how those efforts align with NIST/IEEE P2302. The conversation will also cover identity federation, security, auditing, governance and other technical and policy aspects. During the workshop, broad space will be given to expert panels, working groups, discussions on alternative deployment models and developing an initial scope of a demonstration pilot that leverages previous and will inform our understanding of cloud federation requirements and in particular in the global research space.

Additionally, some selected presenters would welcome anyone who would like to contribute to the various panels to join in – ultimately, the workshop is intended to be highly interactive and open and importantly, to reflect the interests and views of the user and research community. Through this workshop, new insights will be gathered on the challenges facing federation efforts and to validate the scope of coverage through use-case conversations on interoperability and federation.

You can book here your ticket as well as getting more detailed information about the event.