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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."
Like so many promising high-tech ideas, the word "cloud computing" is being over-used. Cloud computing means being able to get virtual hosting with a few clicks, and automatically scale up and down as demand changes, all while being billed by resources actually used.
Not every cluster of servers or supercomputer deserves to be called "cloud." Not everyone who runs VMware deserves to be called "cloud."
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