Exploring Clouds for Acceleration of Science, or E-CAS, is a project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) that is being administered and coordinated by Internet2 in collaboration with commercial cloud providers. Six proposals were selected in the first phase of the project from researchers representing a variety of academic disciplines and seeking to better understand how cloud capabilities can support their big data research. The project is now in its second phase focused on delivering scientific results and includes two of the six original research proposals.

We are now in phase two of the E-CAS project, where the two selected teams received sub-awards for demonstrating innovation and the acceleration of science. One project is exploring processing large Hadron Collider data, and the other is researching the brain’s neural coding mechanisms.

Here’s a summary of how the E-CAS program works.