NASA Plans Cloud Marketplace For Scientists

NASA, already among the government leaders in cloud computing, plans to offer a cloud storefront where scientists will be able to determine their computing needs and access cloud services from a central location.

The space agency is widely known as a cloud computing success story in the government for its Nebula cloud computing platform, an open source, private cloud platform, primarily for scientific computing. Nebula includes data centers built in shipping containers as part of its infrastructure. Now, however, NASA plans to expand beyond Nebula with a cloud marketplace and new services.

Through Nebula, NASA already offers infrastructure as a service (IaaS). It also offers storage as a service. To that short list will soon be added platform as a service and "data as a service," NASA Goddard CIO Adrian Gardner said at a National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) cloud computing event Wednesday...