CERN Keeps Options Open With Its Clouds
June 3, 2015
Grazed from Forbes. Author: Paul Miller.
Europe’s particle physics lab, CERN, generated its share of cloudy headlines at the recent OpenStack Summit in Vancouver, as a multi-year collaboration between CERN’s openlab Project and managed cloud provider Rackspace reached prime-time as the underpinnings of OpenStack Kilo’s federated identity capability. Other organizations also contributed code and ideas as this project rolled into OpenStack, but CERN continues to explore other cloud technologies and perhaps even other ways of solving very similar problems.
As Frederic Lardinois reported for TechCrunch at the time, OpenStack Executive Director Jonathan Bryce used the opening keynote at last month’s Summit in Vancouver to announce a number of advances within the project. One of those was support for ‘federated identity,’ or the ability to log in to a remote OpenStack cloud using credentials associated with your own OpenStack cloud…
Given the early — but essentially unrealized — promise of a global network of interoperating OpenStack-powered clouds, this federated identity capability is an important step in the right direction. And use cases like CERN’s — where international teams of scientists may very reasonably wish to regularly process data on CERN’s servers, on servers at their own universities and research centers, and even on the public cloud — are a prime example of why an ability to access all of these resources with a single login matters…
Read more from the source @ http://www.forbes.com/sites/paulmiller/2015/06/02/cern-keeps-options-open-with-its-clouds/