Jeff Albert
Among the Clouds: Answers to the world’s biggest mysteries to be hosted by the University of Victoria’s cloud computing and storage services
Words by Jessica Natale Woollard Photos by Aaron Putsch
In Australia and South Africa, the two largest radio telescope arrays in the world are under construction. Part of a global collaboration, the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) will push the boundaries of science and our understanding of the universe. They will collect massive amounts of pictures and information from space and send it to data centres around the world. Scientists will mine the data to answer fundamental questions about our world, for example: understanding the evolution of galaxies, the inner workings of the sun, magnetism in the universe and the origins of life.
SKA is expected to produce approximately 30.5 petabytes of data every week starting in 2027, and eventually up to 100 petabytes a week in 2030. For context, one petabyte equals 1 million gigabytes or 1,000 terabytes. That mind-bending amount of data needs massive, powerful storage homes to secure it and enable researchers to access it for their studies.
In partnership with the Canadian Astronomical Data Centre at the National Research Council Canada and the Digital Research Alliance of Canada (DRAC), the University of Victoria (UVic) will be one such storage home for SKA’s data. The university’s cloud computing and storage infrastructure, run by Professional Employees Association members on the Research Computing Services team within the University Systems department, will accept approximately six per cent of the arrays’ data to store on its Victoria campus and make available to astronomers and scientists for processing and analysis.
“This project is going to be the biggest research project in the world and certainly one of the most significant research projects in this decade,” says PEA member Jeff Albert, manager and architect of advanced research computing infrastructure at UVic. “To be involved in this, to be on the ground floor at the very beginning of this project, and for Canada to be a founding member of this work, we have an opportunity to get on the world stage.”
UVic has been building the reputation of its cloud computing and storage expertise and capacity for more than a decade. Working with researchers at UVic, across Canada and around the world, Albert’s team of eight builds custom cloud computing and storage infrastructure to meet the needs of researchers, at the scale they need it, and then operates the systems to keep the data secure and performing optimally.
“Our work is an application of the same technology processes that underpin almost all modern business; everything from Silicon Valley tech companies to Fortune 500 banks use the same kind of systems and tools that we build,” Albert explains.
“Every year, we add exponentially more data into the world than existed before,” he says. “That’s perhaps even more so true for researchers, because their purpose largely is to discover new information, and so they’re creating very large amounts of data in order to search for that digital information. Then, you need to process through that raw data to find the trends and patterns that produce valuable research outcomes.”
The Arbutus Research Cloud is another major initiative led by Albert’s team. Established in 2015, it’s Canada’s largest cloud computing site for academic research and is one of five national host sites in the country funded by the Digital Research Alliance of Canada. In 2023, UVic received a portion of $228.3 million in funding by Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada through the Alliance to upgrade and expand the infrastructure.
Arbutus provides similar cloud services to what the public can get from commercial clouds like Google Cloud or Amazon Web Services, except that Arbutus is used only for academic research and provides data sovereignty and ownership for the researchers. Commercial clouds are rented spaces, and renters have limited control—for example, if they miss a payment, their service could end, and they may lose their data. With a community cloud model like Arbutus, hosted and operated entirely at UVic at no direct cost to the researchers who use it, there’s no risk of service disruption if a researcher’s funding position changes.
“We have folks who are doing genetic and genomic analysis; others who are doing virus and protein profiling for drug discovery,” Albert lists, noting researchers who discovered the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland had some of the data processed on Arbutus Cloud systems. “There’s data from every discipline—science, social sciences, humanities, fine arts. The infrastructure that we provide gives all of these researchers a way to work through their vast streams of data.”
The Arbutus Cloud is administered by DRAC and is available to all Canadian researchers. Nearly everyone who has a faculty or librarian designation at any accredited university is likely eligible to use the Arbutus Cloud. They can simply request access through DRAC, and they’ll receive space.
Before shared, massive cloud systems like Arbutus were established, researchers were responsible for finding and administering their own storage and computing infrastructure. Often, they would use money from research grants they received to pay for these services, resulting in fewer funds available for their research.
There’s another problem, too: researchers are not technology experts, and they had to divert their attention from their research to developing an understanding of computing.
“Most researchers are not technology architects,” says Albert. “Computing is a very, very complicated space. Information security alone is an entire career field for several different kinds of specialists.”
Today, by pooling computing resources and having them hosted at institutions with built-in computing expertise, researchers have access to bigger, more powerful systems than any they could have created on their own at a much lower cost to them, and the systems are being run by technology professionals and specialists at each of the hosting sites. Researchers can now focus their attention and funds on their important work advancing knowledge.
Advances in technology propelled Albert’s career
Albert has enjoyed a front-row seat to computing’s rapid transformation over the last 25 years. He started as a computer help desk analyst at the University of Alberta in 2002, moving to a similar role at UVic in 2004, when he joined the PEA. Every few years, he was able to advance at UVic, accepting roles with greater technical complexity. In 2018, UVic expanded the Research Computing team to meet the needs of the Arbutus Cloud; at that time, Albert moved into a senior administrator role, then into his current role as manager and architect in 2022.
He credits the PEA and UVic for giving him the chance to grow and develop his career at the university; he was able to expand his technological expertise while developing his administrative and managerial skills, he says.
In the field of technology, there is always something new on the horizon—AI, for example. For Albert, that’s what he finds so exciting about this work; he will share knowledge with cloud computing partners across the country to adapt and improve services.
“Almost everyone is interested in having access to AI now, but how do you provide something that’s not set in stone yet at a national scale and at the research computing scale?” he explains, describing how advances in technology require new solutions, giving experts in his field a constant supply of challenging, interesting work. “There’s a lot to think about so that the team will be well supported to build new systems that are ready for the future.”
An honour to support research
As a hiring manager and PEA UVic chapter representative, Albert says job candidates sometimes ask him why they should work at UVic instead of Silicon Valley, where they can make more money.
“The answer is, UVic can be the best place in the world to work if you take advantage of all the benefits that are offered,” he says, highlighting the benefits package and vacation allotment.
Albert says high-quality candidates frequently agree and accept his job offer, which has allowed him to assemble a “dream team.”
“These are some of the most talented people I’ve ever encountered anywhere,” he adds. “They are top-notch talent who understand the technology in a way that I never will, and they’re really good people—good to each other and good to the organization.”
The work the team does is incredibly challenging, but it’s inspiring, he continues, and job candidates recognize the value of contributing to leading-edge research.
“Every project we support is a potential game changer in their field,” he explains. “I’ve worked with everyone from scientists working on child cancer treatments to fundamental chemistry discoveries, folks who are working on drone piloting, on artificial intelligence for self-driving cars.”
“But I actually think there’s a wider range of benefits that come from this, for Victorians to British Columbians to Canadians: operating infrastructure like this answers some of the needs for technology sovereignty and homegrown capability to run our own major technology infrastructure. It helps set us up on the world stage.
“What matters to my team,” he continues, “is why we build these systems, and the reason why we build them is to support research. People are discovering, developing, learning, proposing new things at a rate that I would never have imagined, in a diversity of fields and studies that I would never have imagined.
“To have even a small part in that is a tremendous honour.”
See the article in the Professional, Winter 2025
