Interoperable open source clouds for NASA and Japan

NASA's Chief Technology Officer, Chris C Kemp, has demonstrated interoperability between NASA's Nebula cloud and Japan's NII (National Institute of Informatics) cloud in a first step to sharing resources for the benefit of the international science community. The demonstration, which took place during NII's annual Open House event in Tokyo, used both clouds to serve selections of the Mars Orbiter data sets to a web application. Kemp said that "By demonstrating how cloud interoperability can facilitate international collaboration and seamless global access to public data" NASA hopes to accelerate the development of cloud standards and the adoption of cloud infrastructure services by the scientific community.

Both NASA's Nebula and NII's cloud are constructed entirely from open-source components with open data APIs. NASA and NII now plan to collaborate on open source reference implementations of interoperable cloud services. Nebula allows NASA scientists and researchers access to high performance computing and data storage services and enables the processing of large scientific data sets, while the NII cloud provides similar services to Japan's academic and research community.

(djwm)