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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."
Frankly I`m just suprised that the US government has a whole department dedicated to wasting energy.
Sorry to break it to you, but most government departments are dedicated to wasting energy.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
With that much money they could get a quarter of an F-22 fighter jet! How dare they spend it on research?
The kind where the company who receives the contract is located in a particular Representative's district.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
The right question is who cares when the NSA is spending $2 billion just on the structure for a building (1 million square feet big) to house computers which will do who knows what for signals intelligence. Not to mention another facility in San Antonio being built which will be the size of the Alomodome.
Let's not care about that but nitpick over something ~1% the size and far less destructive to our liberties.
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
I will gladly give you $0.21 if I (and the many generations after me) get something useful in return. Like the Internet infrastructure we are all using right now.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
and remember, kids: this thread was brought to you by a 40-year-old DARPA project.
The DOE and DARPA (and others) are huge users of HPC (high performance computing) applications. The have a vested interest in having the state of the art advance in parallel computing and so they tend to provide lots of research grants to fund that. They also routinely let outsiders use some of their computing facilities for the same reason (not all of their labs do classified work). There are many computing facilities that need enormous computing power as shown on the Top 500 list. But they are seeing that there are times where researchers need computational power, but not at such a large scale and not for long periods of time. If medium powered computational facilities could be made available to researchers cheaply and quickly, they would be widely used.
In socialist America, children go to school and learn something useful, everyone has healthcare, the entire planet doesn't see the US as a meddling bully that resorts to violence to solve all of its problems, and technology is seen as an opportunity rather than a nuisance. Oh, the horror!
weinersmith