Nasa Jet Propulsion Lab bets big on cloud computing
November 29, 2012
Grazed from V3.co.uk. Author: Shaun Nichols.
Administrators with Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) are looking to cloud computing platforms to power the administration’s next generation of projects. Speaking at the 2012 re:Invent conference, Nasa IT CTO Tom Soderstrom and software engineer Khawaja Shams said that the JPL staff are using cloud platforms to power, among other things, the Mars Curiosity rover mission.
The rover, which has already made a number of historical discoveries on the red planet, uses a number of computing and storage platforms from Amazon in order to communicate with the rover and process data gathered in the mission…
The pair said that the rover project is part of a larger effort by the JPL staff to move its operations to cloud compute services. The effort was born in 2008 when administrators, weary of budget shortfalls, ordered IT staff not to purchase any more physical servers. As the agency began to adopt cloud platforms, developers began introducing low-risk platforms such as public-facing web applications, into the cloud. Eventually, JPL found that the cloud systems would be able to handle mission critical and secure applications…
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