NASA is developing a new integrated Cloud Computing environment they call NEBULA at NASA Ames Research Center. NEBULA is an open-source project, built from the ground up with common tools: Eucalyptus, JAVA, LDAP, Lustre, MySQL, Python, SAML, Subversion, and TRAC. It will provide high-capacity computing, storage and network connectivity, and use a ‘virtualized, scalable approach to achieve cost and energy efficiencies’.

According to the NEBULA website:

The fully-integrated nature of the NEBULA components provides for extremely rapid development of policy-compliant and secure web applications, fosters and encourages code reuse, and improves the coherence and cohesiveness of NASA’s collaborative web applications. It is used for Education and Public Outreach, for collaboration and public input, and also for mission support.

NEBULA extends the Software-as-a-Service to the realm of Platform-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service. In the process, slaying several classic conundrums of computational collaboration.

I wish them the best of luck.

(See also: NEBULA site)
(See also: InformationWeek: NASA Launches Nebula Compute Cloud)
(See also: Open Eucalyptus project)
(See also: Eucalyptus Cloud Computing presentation)