Opening in the clouds
Meet Dan Still. He is the newest member of the NeIC team and is responsible for the Glenna project. Glenna is Icelandic for “opening in the clouds” - a poetic way to designate the coming Nordic Cloud.
Dan is a Finnish computer scientist and has worked at CSC since 2005. Before that he was employed at Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago, USA. From 1 September 2014 he is spending 50 % of his time at NeIC, where he is managing the brand-new Glenna project, scheduled to run for the next two years.
Could you give a brief description of the Glenna project?
- The objective of the Glenna project is to share knowledge, set best practices on managing cloud services and to create a Nordic federated cloud service. Like everything else under NeIC, it is driven by the needs of Nordic researchers. The vision is that once a Nordic federated cloud service is in place Nordic researchers could run their experiments and manage their data on any Nordic Cloud resource. If the project is successful this would be really nice, because it will make sharing knowledge much easier. If you think about it in terms of the apps you have on your smartphone, this is a little like creating an app store for scientific applications. The Glenna project will allow you to run your own programs and use the programs of others. We also intend to build on experience from on-going and earlier NeIC projects e.g. the Tryggve and B2Share Nordic projects with the goals of increasing overall availability and security of data.
What are you most looking forward to in your new position?
- I’m excited about working with the other Nordic partners. It reminds me of the old NDGF (Nordic Data Grid Facility) days, where I took part in 2006-2007 in the building of the shared Tier-1. I’m looking forward to reconnecting with some of the people from back then. This will also give me a great overview over what is happening in Nordic countries. I have been working with computers a long time, but it’s the first time I will be working within a virtual team most of the time and I am really looking forward to the experience.