CloudBank at Berkeley

Citation

Jon Bashor. “NSF-funded CloudBank will broaden access to Berkeley’s data science educational infrastructure.” UC Berkeley College of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS), news, September 8, 2020. https://cdss.berkeley.edu/news/nsf-funded-cloudbank-will-broaden-access-berkeleys-data-science-educational-infrastructure.

Read 2026-10-26.

It gives the thread as “CalCompute - Time Sensitive”. Message 1a059df6ffa0997c is in the thread “Congratulations, and a short CalCompute ask”, so this page cites that thread.

Bottom line

CloudBank is a National Science Foundation (NSF) program that makes public cloud use simpler for computer science research and education. The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) runs it with UC Berkeley, the University of Washington and Strategic Blue.
It is a working model of an access and funding intermediary: one broker deals with many cloud providers on contracts, billing and cost.
The article is from 2020. It gives the design, not current users or costs.

Background

The article names Kathy Yelick as “the CloudBank PI for UC Berkeley”. At the time she was “associate dean for research in the Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society”.

Key claims

SDSC and its partners “have entered production operations of the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded CloudBank program, which aims to simplify the use of public clouds across computer science research and education” (paragraph 1).
“CloudBank is the result of a mid-2019 $5 million NSF award to SDSC and its partners to develop a suite of managed services to simplify public cloud access” (paragraph 2).
Kathy Yelick: “We are building support for the data science education software stack within CloudBank, making it easier for universities to use the material from Berkeley’s program” (paragraph 5).
CloudBank supports NSF Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) solicitations “that have an option for principal investigators to request public cloud resources as part of the proposal”. Three were open in 2020 (paragraphs 6 and 7).
“Through an innovative partnership with Strategic Blue, CloudBank is able to work with a single entity rather than each provider individually. This results in both operational and cost efficiencies that can be passed along to researchers” (paragraph 8).

Evidence and method

A university news article. It reports the program’s launch as the partners describe it. It links the SDSC award release for the $5 million figure.

Limits

Dated September 8, 2020. It does not say if CloudBank still runs, or on what terms.
It gives no user counts, no cloud spend and no savings figure.
It is CDSS’s own news about its own program.