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State of Public Sector Cloud Computing - NASA
Case Study: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Ames Research Center) – World-Wide Telescope
Using NASA's Nebula cloud platform to store, process and provide access to high-resolution images of the Moon and Mars
Vivek Kundra, U.S. Chief Information Officer
Nebula, NASA’s cloud-computing platform, is helping NASA to engage the public through the viewing and exploration of the Moon and Mars in unprecedented resolution. Nebula allows NASA to process, store and upload thousands of high-resolution images and over 100 terabytes of data. In a traditional IT environment, it would have taken several months to procure new infrastructure and another one to two months of full-time work by two full-time employees to configure the new equipment to handle this data. By utilizing Nebula, NASA saved four to five months of time and roughly 800 hours of labor, allowing the agency to focus on expanding the content accessible to the public instead of building IT infrastructure.
The nature of NASA's activities requires strict security policies, creating a challenge in providing a collaborative environment to share data with outside partners or the public. Nebula's architecture is designed from the ground up for interoperability with commercial cloud service providers, offering NASA researchers the ability to port data sets and code to run on commercial clouds. Nebula provides a secure way for NASA to make its data accessible to partners, avoiding the need to grant access to internal networks. Each researcher needs a varying amount of storage space and compute power to process his or her data sets. In the old operational model, these resources took months to procure and configure and required constant monitoring and frequent upgrades. Using Nebula's cloud computing infrastructure, researchers will be able to provision these services in just a matter of minutes.
NASA space exploration missions can take over 10 years to develop and the resources needed to process the data coming back are usually scheduled and procured well before launch. Missions, however, have a varying degree of success: some are delayed at a late stage, some are cancelled altogether, and some last much longer than originally anticipated. Nebula's cloud services allow NASA to be much more flexible and responsive to actual mission needs, scaling resources up or down as the actual requirements of the mission develop. In addition to supporting NASA’s missions, the Nebula cloud-computing platform has demonstrated additional versatility and has become the home of the Federal Government’s flagship transparency website USAspending.gov. USAspending.gov 2.0 was completely reengineered to leverage the cloud-computing platform at Nebula, and growing the amount of storage as Federal spending data grows will now be a quick and easy process.
