NASA's Nebula Cloud Computing Technology To Play Key Role In New Open Source Initiative
WASHINGTON -- The core technology developed for NASA's Nebula cloud
computing platform has been selected as a contributor for OpenStack,
a newly-launched open source cloud computing initiative. It will pull
together more than 25 companies to play a key role in driving cloud
computing standards for interoperability and portability.
Cloud computing is a way to deliver computing resources, such as
software, storage and virtual computing power, as services over the
Internet. NASA launched the Nebula cloud computing platform to
provide agency researchers with a range of services powerful enough
to manage NASA's large-scale scientific data sets. Nebula offers
unparalleled compute capability, storage and bandwidth to users at
NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., and Goddard
Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
"We hope that OpenStack will form the foundation of a new open source
cloud ecosystem," said NASA chief technology officer for Information
Technology Chris C. Kemp. "With Nebula technology at the core of
OpenStack, NASA will be uniquely positioned to drive standards that
will ensure products and services powered by OpenStack will meet
federal interoperability, portability, and security requirements."
OpenStack is the first large-scale open source cloud project of its
kind and is expected to gather significant momentum in the cloud and
open source communities.
"Nebula technology was selected for inclusion in the OpenStack project
because of its massively scalable architecture and the high quality
of its code" said Jim Curry, director of OpenStack.
The announcement coincides with O'Reilly Media's Open Source
Developers Conference, which is taking place in Portland, Ore., this week.
"Participating in OpenStack will allow NASA to tap into a
well-established community of open source developers and enable us to
benefit from crowd-sourced development efforts." said Raymond
O'Brien, Nebula's program manager.
Nebula is an agency-wide program and was one of three flagship
initiatives highlighted in NASA's Open Government Plan. For more
information on Nebula:
http://nebula.nasa.gov
For more information about NASA's Office of the Chief Information
Officer, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/ocio
Source: NASA
