With the wave of cloud computing technologies,it is easy to get buried in the matter without actually gettinng anywhere to the functionality desired.
After all the criticisms,its acceptance is finally getting strong with US government nurturings it’s root;or should I say cloud seeding.

Let’s have a look at NASA’s efforts to harness cloud computing.

The Nebula Container

Nebula is an open-source cloud computing project and service developed for NASA Scientists and engineers. This provides a platform for NASA scientists and researchers to share large, complex information and its variants with the public. It provides high performance, instantly provisioned computing, storage, and network resources to NASA’s research community. It  leverages virtualization technology, and configures the stack to support massive scalability, Nebula achieves significant cost and energy efficiencies.

Currently, Nebula’s Infrastructure Service provides scalable compute and storage for scientific applications. This service allows NASA users to unilaterally provision, manage, and decommission compute and storage resources on an as-needed basis through a web interface or a set of command-line tools. Nebula’s Platform Service, scheduled for release in 2011, will provide a consistent framework, code repositories, and web services to enable NASA developers to deploy secure, policy-compliant web applications that automatically scale to meet variable demand.

Nebula allows NASA scientists to pool IT resources, use only those services they require, and release those resources for use by others when no longer needed. Nebula enables significant cost savings through better resource utilization, reduced energy consumption, and reduced labor costs associated with procuring infrastructure or creating new web applications.

As of now,many of NASA’s dedicated compute and storage servers are underutilized, but still consume energy and require expensive environmental controls.

Architecture:

Nebula’s high-density architecture allows for a dramatically reduced data center footprint. Each shipping container data center can hold up to 15,000 CPU cores or 15 petabytes of storage while proving 50% more energy efficient than traditional data centers. In addition, this “green” architecture allows for maximum flexibility and efficiency since these modular shipping container data centers can be modified, upgraded, expanded, and even physically relocated as NASA’s computing needs evolve over time.

In a traditional IT environment, it takes several months and usually hundreds of hours of labor by several different people to procure, install, configure, and maintain new IT infrastructure.

By utilizing Nebula, users gain access to powerful IT resources months faster and with far less effort than needed to purchase new IT infrastructure. Nebula saves hundreds of man-hours, allowing NASA scientists to focus on mission-critical activities instead of IT requirements. For that NASA must comply with a host of federal regulations, which can occasionally pose challenges to collaborating or sharing data with outside partners.

Cloud Computing is a significant departure from the traditional IT infrastructure model for everybody. NASA will require technical training and a shift in their teams’ thinking  and planning about IT resources.NASA will need to provide adequate education and training to employees to drive the adoption of cloud computing.

If you’re a NASA collaborator or want to become one or are normal citizen, you too will reap the rewards of Nebula via the research performed. There’s also been a lot of speculation that Nebula will power clusters of data sets other than just NASA’s, such as data.gov.
Their focus, for now, is on NASA’s data.
But, imagine the possibilities if we had a national or even international cloud computing platform.
Remember that it was originally a similar government project called ARPANET that gave rise to today’s Internet. This could be BIG for science, tech, and planet Earth.

Cloud computing followers may be familiar with NASA Nebula Cloud.This post was intended to get the uninitiated started with NASA’s new venture.

The next post will explore more into technical aspects of NASA Nebula.

Till then keep checking and dream high. \m/