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

Repeat after me

[Anonymous Coward]

The "cloud" does not exist. It's a buzzword for client-server, nothing more.

Move along.

It's Mushroom Cloud Research, not computer cloud

[billstewart]

This is the DOE. They mainly work on nukes, and if they're experimenting with cloud computing, it's not because they're trying to do commercial or academic work into cloud computing, it's because they're trying to find powerful and cost-effective ways to get the computing horsepower they need to work on more nukes, just as when they work with supercomputers, it's not just because they're "Imagining what they can do with a Cray", it's because they're trying to solve problems that are really that big.

So, like, back off man, they're scientists!

Or don't back off,. because they're developing weapons as well as civilian power applications, but don't confuse tool-building with pork barrel.