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‘The Cloud is Not Not IT’: Ecological Change in Research Computing in the Cloud

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Abstract

Along with a number of other computing technologies, cloud computing services are increasingly being promoted as a way of enabling openness, reproducibility, and the acceleration of scientific work. While there have been a variety of studies of the cloud in terms of computing performance, there has been little empirical attention to the changes going on around cloud computing at the level of work and practice. Through a qualitative, ethnographic study, we follow a cosmology research group’s transition from a shared high performance computing cluster to a cloud computing service, and examine the cloud service as a coordinative artifact being integrated into a larger ecology of existing practices and artifacts. We find that the transition involves both change and continuity in the group’s coordinative work and maintenance work, and point out some of the effects this adoption has on the group’s larger set of practices. Finally, we discuss practical implications this has for the broader adoption of cloud computing in university-based scientific work.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank members of the Radio Group for involving us in their work, for their patience with our many questions, and for their comments and thoughts on this publication.

Funding

This article is based on work supported by National Science Foundation grants (#1954620 and #1302272). Dr. Paine’s work at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science and Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231. The views in this paper represent the authors and do not represent those of the U.S. National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, or the University of California.

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  1. Human Centered Design and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Will Sutherland & Charlotte P. Lee

  2. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Drew Paine

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  1. Will Sutherland
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  2. Drew Paine
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  3. Charlotte P. Lee
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The first and second authors collected data, all authors contributed to the analysis, and the first author wrote the main text of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Will Sutherland.

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This study was approved by the University of Washington Institutional Review Board.

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Sutherland, W., Paine, D. & Lee, C.P. ‘The Cloud is Not Not IT’: Ecological Change in Research Computing in the Cloud. Comput Supported Coop Work (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-024-09490-1

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