26 May 09


Written by John Treadway. 2 comments

NASA’s NEBULA – Enterprise Cloud Computing for Rocket Scientists and Us…


NEBULA

A few days ago, NASA announced their enterprise computing cloud, NEBULA.  As importantly, they announced that the NEBULA  cloud framework was to be released as an open source project.  In NASA’s own words, NEBULA “provides high-capacity computing, storage and network connectivity, and uses a virtualized, scalable approach to achieve cost and energy efficiencies.”

Here is the NEBULA platform.

The core virtualization and cloud services layer are provided by Eucalyptus, the Amazon Web Services open source clone.  Storage is provided by the open source Lustre clustering file system, while the core application development framework is the Python-based Django project.  Note that Google took serious bashing for releasing their AppEngine framework initially with only Python support.  Their IDE is an integrated stack of Subversion (source code control), Trac (bug tracking) and Agilio “agile development” project management tool set.   Lastly, the content repository is searchable using the Solr framework on top of the Apache Lucene search engine.

When this is released to the general public as an open source project, will this be solid competition vs. commercial enterprise cloud frameworks such as 3tera’s AppLogic?  Is this even a valid question?  I’ll see if I can find out…

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  • http://searchcloudcomputing.com/ Carl Brooks

    Nice new blog! You might find my recent article about NIMBUS and Brookhaven research of interest on this subject. NIMBUS is a cloud provisioner rather than a whole infrastructure stack, but aimed squarely at the same crowd. I wonder if there's any room at all for for-pay software in this world?

    http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/news…

  • http://www.johntreadway.com John Treadway

    Thanks. I like your article. Just as there are both open source and proprietary software offerings, there will be the same for the cloud. However, much of it may be bought by the drink on top of the platform instead of via a perpetual license.