NASA JPL: The business case for taking the cloud to Mars

Grazed from CiteWorld. Autthor: Matt Weinberger.

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) basically defines the bleeding edge with its mandate to build and operate robotics for planetary exploration missions. Which is why it’s no surprise that it’s turned to cutting-edge cloud infrastructure to empower scientists within JPL to use the right technology to deliver the right content and workloads to the right place at the right time, while still maximizing its $1.5 billion annual budget, as explained NASA JPL IT CTO Tom Soderstrom at this week’s CITE Conference in San Francisco.

NASA JPL has been experimenting with the cloud for the last six years, Soderstrom explained. And by "experiment," he doesn’t mean that they proceeded with caution — Soderstrom and his team audited a bunch of solutions from a multitude of vendors, using it for exciting test cases around new and interesting ways to process and visualize big chunks of data with advanced analytics (which he refers to as a "less-hyped version of Big Data")…

"Our approach is to let JPLers test the future now," Soderstrom says. But the main role of the CIO’s office isn’t to dictate technology to the very smart researchers and scientists who work at JPL, Soderstrom says. It’s to act in an consultancy role and work to support the infrastructure these scientists need on a per-project basis, with the net result of NASA JPL contracting the services of no fewer than ten different public and private cloud vendors to offer a full spread of options to its 5,000 employees depending on need…

Read more from the source @ http://www.citeworld.com/article/2149000/cloud-computing/nasa-jpl-the-business-case-for-taking-the-cloud-to-mars.html

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