What Kind of Cloud Computing Project Costs $32M?

coondoggie writes "The US Department of Energy said today it will spend $32 million on a project that will deploy a large cloud computing test bed with thousands of Intel Nehalem CPU cores and explore commercial offerings from Amazon, Microsoft and Google. Ultimately, the project, known as Magellan, will look at cloud computing as a cost-effective and energy-efficient way for scientists to accelerate discoveries in a variety of disciplines, including analysis of scientific data sets in biology, climate change and physics, the DOE stated. Magellan will explore whether cloud computing can help meet the overwhelming demand for scientific computing. Although computation is an increasingly important tool for scientific discovery, and DOE operates some of the world's most powerful supercomputers, not all research applications require such massive computing power. The number of scientists who would benefit from mid-range computing far exceeds the amount of available resources, the DEO stated."

Comments

Re:$32 million?

[maharb]

This bring up a good fucking point. Who the fuck cares about $32 million going to something useful. The government gets invoices for $500 for a screwdriver and they pay up (documented somewhere). We spend millions on each bomb dropped. The $700 billion it is going to cost to reform health care is "not important" according to the democrats. And we are bitching about $32 million that is going towards research that could be useful. Don't get me wrong I think the best way to cut government spending is to look at the details, like the $500 screwdriver thing, but for an organization as big as the US governemnt, spending $32 mill towards research that could save many times more in the future seems like a sound investment.

I really wish people would pick apart all of government spending as critically as this tiny drop in the bucket. I guess it is a much easier task to look at tiny projects and point out flaws but accepting a multibillion dollar proposal with little evidence or proof that it will work is fine.