NASA Nebula, Cloud Computing In a Container

1sockchuck writes "NASA has built its Nebula cloud computing platform inside a data center container so it can add capacity quickly, bringing extra containers online in 120 days. Nebula will provide on-demand computing power for NASA researchers managing large data sets and image repositories. 'Nebula has been designed to automatically increase the computing power and storage available to science- and data-oriented web applications as demand rises,' explains NASA's Chris Kemp. NASA has created the project using open source components and will release Nebula back to the open source community. 'Hopefully we can provide a good example of a successful large-scale open source project in the government and pave the way for similar projects in other agencies,' the Nebula team writes on its blog."

Comments

Re:Of course they will

[Mortaegus]

Not necessarily. I wouldn't want military weapons systems to use open-sourced software, and I believe that any work that takes time, effort, and an investment in resources should be properly rewarded, so not releasing the source-code in such instances is entirely forgivable. Provided, of course, that it is released within a reasonable time frame. I'll freely admit to stealing other people's work in the past and adapting it to my own ends. The difference being that I understood what was done and was capable of doing it myself if I had the time and resources to invest in making it, but without their original work I would have lacked the foundation upon which my own is built. It's called evolution, and it applies to more than physiology. Keeping code closed forever is like making a species extinct. Something else might come in and fill the void, eventually, but it has been removed from the gene-pool. But maybe that's a bad example.