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Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.
The US government continues putting its money – and its scientists – where its mouth is (at least when it gets to cloud computing). About one month after federal CIO Vivek Kundra’s announcement of an initiative to maximize the use of public cloud services by government agencies, the government has dished out $32 million to build a private cloud in two of the US Department of Energy’s research labs to explore the option of running scientific applications on a shared IT infrastructure.
DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., and Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, Ill., each received $16 million through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (also known as “the stimulus package”) to implement the “Magellan” project.
It involves installing mid-range computer hardware in the two labs’ respective supercomputer centers, which – once interconnected – will constitute a cloud platform. Scientific applications will run on Magellan, sharing the pool of compute and storage resources it provides, with the goal of finding out “whether cloud computing can help meet the overwhelming demand for scientific computing,” LBNL said in a statement.
The two centers will be connected by a 100 Gb-per-second network, developed by DOE’s ESnet – another project funded by the ARRA.
While the labs already have some of the most powerful computing equipment in the world, many of the scientists’ applications require far less capacity than that equipment provides, making them prime candidates for Magellan.
Magellan hardware will be deployed in LBNL’s supercomputer center called the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center. The center’s scientists will work together with the office of the laboratory’s CIO Rosio Alvarez.
“We’re going to partner with them on doing the commercial analysis,” Alvarez said in an interview. “They’re developing this private cloud but they also want to look and see how it compares to the … commercial cloud offerings.”
LBNL, under Alvarez’s leadership, has been using Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud services to handle unanticipated spikes in demand. One of Magellan’s objectives is to identify the differences between “running scientific applications in the commercial cloud versus running them in the private DOE cloud.”
Alvarez’s office will share information and its EC2 resources with NERSC and vice versa.
Another federal agency that has built a private cloud is the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The space agency’s cloud is called Nebula. It was developed by scientists at the agency’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley.
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Keywords: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, LBNL, cloud computing, data center, project Magellan, Magellan cloud, Department of Energy, ARRA, Argonne National Laboratory, federal cloud | | 
