OCEAN

The Open Collective Environmental Action Network serves research and scientific efforts in climate science that take action through discovery utilizing collateral and emerging networked technology to benefit our environment holistically. OCEAN is a rapidly available, hyperscale research computing network made available to help reveal ¹”untapped value in the “long tail” of scientific research”. An ecosystem for the ecosystem.

Through private and public donation, with a transparent budget and public ledger, OCEAN is able to facilitate resources for efforts to combat the shallow and deep detrimental impacts our ecosystems currently face. Through social efforts we can enable researchers and scientists to accelerate their time to discovery, potentially lessening impacts and growing a collective body to sustain this effort. This is a Research Computing Cloud designed for it's users.

Projects in high performance computing include specific domains like Geophysical Sciences and also other domains related to computational mathematics that orchestrate and manage energy intensive applications. A hyperscale high performance computing cluster on a carbon neutral public cloud will continue to be maintained in order to facilitate immediate needs for researchers and scientists to create a responsible solution for their workflows. This computing environment will provide short term and long term access to users needing additional cloud resources at scale. While core operating components are always available and maintained, much of this resource is ephemeral meaning it scales up and down to fulfill requests and further limits the amount of energy waste potentially realized by the resources allocated for these applications.

The current operating costs for OCEAN are shown below. These expenses include assets which carry fixed costs for management and operations. Some of these costs are related to administration and management for the human services related to operations and the physical infrastructure costs associated with the project. Due to the variable nature of scientific computational workloads there will be an available budget visible to the community with calculators to help provide transparency to current available funding.

OCEAN & Resource Sustainability

Many scientific research applications are resource intensive which incurs financial costs as well as environmental costs. By positioning our resources with Google we are naturally meeting our core mission to limit the potential for indirect destruction while conducting research. Doing harm to the environment we are attempting to protect is no way to conduct ourselves and we intend to provide carbon-free resources through Google Cloud to OCEAN users. Learn more about Google Cloud's efforts in Cloud sustainability here.

The OCEAN team, currently provided and supported by Fluid Numerics, is able to review the potential carbon impact of system resources using data that feeds tools like this publicly available carbon-free cloud calculator from Google. All runs on Google are considered carbon neutral but we must dive a little deeper to can claim carbon-free. We are getting there and OCEAN is available to assist other projects in navigating the potential of a carbon-free climate research network.

OCEAN Support

Membership to a hosted project like OS Hackathon is a great way to show ongoing support. Benefits from membership varies from organization to organization. Please visit our Open Collective page and reach out to understand what you can do to help. Projects that are funded for cloud resources can submit their contributions for cloud resources through Open Collective. Some projects might qualify for Google Cloud Research Credits in which case they are only seeking advanced support assistance where necessary. The OCEAN project team handles these service and support recommendations on a per project basis. Please reach out to projects@waterchange.org to begin a discussion about your using OCEAN for your project.