The KENET Virtual Lab (VLab) is a virtual cloud environment that provides research ICT services to the Kenyan community of researchers in different areas such as Bioinformatics, Public Health and Materials Science among others. The end goal for the VLab is to provide computing and storage services to the researcher which help solve problems at hand rather than encumbering the researcher with installations and customization of the infrastructure or virtualized servers.

The VLab allows researchers to provision their own instances of pre-configured appliances (images) in just a few clicks where each appliance is loaded with specific scientific software for sharing code and visualizations. The platform provides select pre-configured virtual appliances running various software tracks such as statistical analysis, Quantum Espresso, NumPy/Scikit which can be deployed on demand. Users can then self-provision the virtual machines by specifying the then select the amount of CPU, RAM and Disk Space desired to run the appliance.

The VLab has been used for research and education purposes to seamless computing resources management. The platform is a secure and isolated environment only accessible for use by approved users who are affiliated to KENET member Institutions.

Read of use cases here