NASA Nebula, Cloud Computing In a Container 55
1sockchuck writes "NASA has built its Nebula cloud computing platform inside a data center container so it can add capacity quickly, bringing extra containers online in 120 days. Nebula will provide on-demand computing power for NASA researchers managing large data sets and image repositories. 'Nebula has been designed to automatically increase the computing power and storage available to science- and data-oriented web applications as demand rises,' explains NASA's Chris Kemp. NASA has created the project using open source components and will release Nebula back to the open source community. 'Hopefully we can provide a good example of a successful large-scale open source project in the government and pave the way for similar projects in other agencies,' the Nebula team writes on its blog."
wrong use of "cloud?" (Score:5, Informative)
Like so many promising high-tech ideas, the word "cloud computing" is being over-used. Cloud computing means being able to get virtual hosting with a few clicks, and automatically scale up and down as demand changes, all while being billed by resources actually used.
Not every cluster of servers or supercomputer deserves to be called "cloud." Not everyone who runs VMware deserves to be called "cloud."
They're using Eucalyptus (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I don't get it. (Score:5, Informative)
Shipping containers are stackable. Remember when blade servers were introduced, and many people said "no one will want those, you can't even install per-node peripherals"? These are the blade server equivalent of data centers. Also, all ISO shipping containers have convenient mounting points, so you can protect these from heavy weather by sinking piles and just bolting them down. They even have the potential to be watertight, so if you built them cleverly enough, with air intakes and exhausts bussed through them and with hoods on the roof of the top unit, they could even be flood-resistant in such a scenario.
I have no idea if any of that applies to this system, but there's good reasons to use containers.
Re:Is NASA suffering from mission creep? (Score:3, Informative)
To follow up on this (Disclaimer: I am a NASA employee), NASA and other federal agencies are prohibited by policy and law from transmitting or storing many of our data types on non-government owned hardware and networks. (Transmitting of course can be done if it's tightly encrypted). Processing our data on private servers is strictly prohibited in many cases.
The most frequently cited laws and policies which dictate this are FISMA and OMB M-06-16, but there are many others. Employees are even prohibited from doing team collaboration with things like Google Docs, because information which is not yet deemed to be sensitive (say, an immature design for a propulsion system) might become very sensitive, and once it's "out" it is out for good.
Like it or not, there's a lot of other countries with developing missile programs, communications programs and many other technologies which have dual civilian and military use, and NASA is charged by congress with keeping technology that may have military applications out of foreign hands.
If Nebula is able to perform as well as clouds such as EC2 and the like, and allow NASA and other federal agencies to do cloud style processing within the government sector, it could save HUGE amounts of taxpayer money that's otherwise legally obligated to be "Wasted".