AZURE FOR

RESEARCH AND EDUCTION

Henrik Nordborg, Lukasz Miroslaw

Institute for Energy Technology

Microsoft Innovation Center

HSR Rapperswil

Microsoft Schweiz, Wallisellen

The October temperature is – literally – off the charts

The highest ever

measured temperature

anomaly in 1600

months

The October temperature is – literally – off the charts

Zu spät für +2°C?

Donnerstag 19.11.2015, 17:00

www.hsr.ch/klimawandel

Outline

The need for IT in education

About the HSR

Microsoft Innovation Center, Rapperswil

The ideal IT infrastructure for research and education

Flexibility

Intermittency

Online collaboration

Cost efficiency

What Azure provides

Real-world examples

Azure Live Demo (Lukasz Miroslaw)

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The need for IT in education: Bridging the generation gap

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The need for IT in education – a personal view

Everyone with a tertiary education will work with computers

Probably doing something that has not been invented yet

IT literacy and some programming are important

IT can be a very good tool for education

Visualization of concepts (mathematics, physics, chemistry)

Aiding the learning process

Young people are receptive to new technologies

Who is teaching whom?

Education need be become more efficient

Assessing the performance of students is boring and time consuming

There has to be a better way

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About the HSR

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• University of Applied Sciences (Fachhochschule)

• Approximately 1500 students

• 8 Bachelor Degrees

• Master’s Degree Programs

• Continuing education and training

• Applied research

• 18 institutes

• Approx. 70 professors and 200 research staff

About the HSR – collaboration with industry

Three forms of collaboration

Student theses (240 – 810 hours of work)

CTI projects (50-50 cost distribution)

Consulting

Every institute partner is a profit center

Very experienced staff

Excellent facilities

Computation cluster

High-voltage laboratory

3D scanning and printing

Advanced measurements

….

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The Microsoft Innovation Center, Rapperswil

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Foundation of the .NET Competence Center

2003

Opening of MIC Rapperswil

2005

2008

Partnership with Microsoft Switzerland

Opening of MIC Technical Computing 2011

Microsoft Innovation Cloud

2014

MIC Rapperswil: People and Institutes

INS (www.ins.hsr.ch)

Prof. Hansjörg Huser

Prof. Beat Stettler

Jürg Jucker

IFS (www.ifs.hsr.ch)

Prof. Olaf Zimmermann

Prof. Markus Stolze

IET (www.iet.hsr.ch)

Prof. Henrik Nordborg

Dr. Ing. Lukasz Miroslaw

Dr. Ing. Mario Mürmann

Dipl. Ing. Roman Fuchs

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http://www.msic.ch

IT requirements at the HSR

Flexibility!!!!

A large number of software tools need to be installed

Every student has different needs and requirements

Students should install software themselves

Fluctuating workloads

Computing power required at the end of each

semester

The computational needs depend on the projects

A lot of storage required from simulations and

measurements

Online collaboration

Students work together on writing reports and theses

Master students: collaboration between universities

Collaboration with companies (mainly SMEs)

Do we need the computer room?

A virtual machine for every student

New applications in teaching

Huge potential and a lot of work

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Flexibility = Virtual Machines

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Create any number of virtual machines for different applications.

Flexibility – obtain the computing power you need

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Virtual Machines – a standard virtual desktop

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Virtual Machines – examples and costs

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Virtual Machines

Available with Windows or Ubuntu Linux

Can be preconfigured with any software

Can easily be cloned and deployed

You only pay when you use them

Ideal for lectures and projects

Provide students access to a machine during the course of a project

Give students the right to install their own software

Give students from different universities access to a common infrastructure

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Example: MSE Course in Computational Fluid Dynamics

Students coming from all over Switzerland

Excercises using OpenFOAM (open source CFD software)

Every student needs access to this software during 14 weeks

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Example: MSE Master Thesis in Singapore

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A virtual Azure workstation +

Azure storage can be

accessed from everywhere

Azure in education – some other issues

Online collaboration

Students will use online collaboration tools

The question is only whether it is provided by the university or not

Office 365 is really popular among students

Word, Excel, PowerPoint, …

OneNote for collecting information and taking notes

Windows tablets are becoming really popular

Reading scripts

Taking notes

Storage

Cloud storage is cheap, both for students and universities

External USB drives cannot be the solution of the future

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Improving teaching – are we still doing the right thing?

What should we teach?

What is the value of solving equations on paper?

Does everyone need to be able to program?

What about general computer skills

How should we teach it?

More multimedia during lectures

Student participation (using, laptop, tablet, or smartphone).

Can we become more efficient?

Correcting and grading written exams is time-consuming and boring

Assessing student performance should be simpler

We should spend our time teaching!!!

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Computing power to students

What about compute intensive applications – simulations?

Three issues to solve …

Data management

Computation

Visualization – pre- and post-processing

… but they are already solved

HPC nodes on Azure are really powerful (16 cores, 112 GB RAM)

Infiniband networking works on Azure (distributed parallel computing)

Storage on Azure is cheaper than local storage

Visualization over Remote Desktop is OK for many purposes

Better solutions with GPU and OpenGL-Support are being implemented

A virtual cluster can be scaled to any size when it is needed

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