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State of Public Sector Cloud Computing - Enterprise Data Center Strategy
Case Study: National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Cancelled proposal requests that would have yielded up to $1.5 billion in enterprise data center contracts and now exploring cloud alternatives
Vivek Kundra, U.S. Chief Information Officer
NASA recently announced that it is re-evaluating its enterprise data center strategy and has halted a request for proposals that would have yielded an indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity contract with a maximum value up to $1.5 billion for outsourced data center services over multiple years.
Concurrently, a number of organizations within NASA are evaluating the use of Nebula, NASA’s scientific cloud solution for possible application in satisfying their mission data center needs:
- The Flight Vehicle Research & Technology Division at Ames Research Center is exploring using Nebula for their Message Passing Interface (MPI) implementation. This group performs flight vehicle air flow computation. Data from each piece of the aircraft surface runs on a different compute node and each node communicates edge conditions to its neighboring nodes using MPI. Currently, it takes a very expensive suite of equipment to do that work: NASA’s 60000-core Pleiades computer. Although Nebula does not compete on performance with Pleiades, the setup time and money saved by self-provisioning compute power makes Nebula an attractive alternative.
- A second mission organization with enormous memory and storage requirements is interested in Nebula because the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) beta version, scheduled for release June 2010, will allow them to specify the amount of memory and storage needed for their virtual machines. One of the group's storage-heavy applications requires 12 GB of memory, which can be accommodated on the Nebula IaaS cloud solution.
- A third organization is evaluating Nebula to create virtual workstations for software developers to write and test-compile their code. Nebula would give them more fine-grained control over the development environment and allow developers to share the many modules and libraries currently running on their local desktops.
And yet another organization is evaluating Nebula as a service platform for interaction with non-NASA partners. Nebula would enable anonymous but controlled FTP for large file transfers and run an in-house, web-based java application that analyzes and visualizes data produced by NASA’s Airspace Concept Evaluation System.
