The Open Cloud Consortium (OCC) announced that the Geographic Information Systems Research Center (GIS) out of Feng Chia University, Taiwan is now a member of the OCC. The Open Cloud Consortium (OCC) has been providing cloud infrastructure for researchers with big data needs since 2009. The Open Cloud Consortium (OCC) is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit supporting the scientific community by operating cloud infrastructure to support scientific, environmental, medical, and healthcare research.

GIS Research Center at Feng Chia University will primarily be participating in two of the OCC’s working groups: Project Matsu and the PIRE program.

Project Matsu is a collaboration between NASA and the OCC to develop open source technology for cloud-based processing of satellite imagery to support the earth sciences. One of the primary goals is to assist first responders at disaster sites. More information can be found on the Project Matsu homepage.

GIS Research Center at Feng Chia University will also be a featured Foreign Partner in the PIRE program. The PIRE Program provides international research and education experiences through training and study at universities and research institutes around the world with leading scientists in the field of computing. The goal of the project is to increase the participants’ expertise in managing and analyzing data. The creation of a strong cadre of students with a global perspective on scientific data management will support research endeavors in many other areas vital to US. International Collaboration. More information on how to get involved in PIRE can be found on the PIRE homepage.

The OCC manages and operates the Open Science Data Cloud (OSDC), which is a multi-petabyte distributed cloud-based infrastructure for managing, analyzing, integrating and sharing scientific data. Over the past four years of operations, the OSDC has developed the expertise to set up and operate open source science clouds over geographically distributed data centers connected with 10G high performance networks.

The OCC currently distributes approximately 1 PB of scientific data to interested users and plans in each of the next several years to roughly double the amount of data that it distributes.