5 ms·

NASA's Open Source Cloud

54 points by ajray 15y ago

en1ma 15y ago
I'm surprised no one has commented yet. This is pretty freaking awesome.
- EricBurnett 15y ago
  I'm trying to figure out exactly what this is, to be honest. To me it looks like their version of Amazon Web Services, for sharing compute resources exclusively within their community. But I can't tell whether it's just providing secure hardware to throw VMs at or if they've built the support infrastructure like a fault tolerant file system as well. Edit: From http://nebula.nasa.gov/services/ http://nebula.nasa.gov/services/ it appears they have a distributed file system, but otherwise it's simply a set of networked machines.
dillona 15y ago
How is this related to the OpenStack project? I know NASA was an original partner in that
- viraptor 15y ago
  From the description it seems like exactly what OpenStack provides (even regarding architecture, access to own network, etc.). The only place where it's explicitly mentioned is the blog (http://nebula.nasa.gov/blog/2011/may/nebula-team-releases-new-features-and-fixes/ http://nebula.nasa.gov/blog/2011/may/nebula-team-releases-ne...) They might be running something more recent than Bexar though, since that one's rather old and doesn't provide many features required for large-scale operation.
zitterbewegung 15y ago
Looks cool. Is the advantage to this that its close to Nasa datasets?
- dmoney 15y ago
  The advantage is probably just that it's owned by NASA rather than by a private entity. This could allow it to be used for sensitive or classified applications, or for space related applications (which could be classed as munitions, which [I'm not a lawyer, but i'm guessing...] means putting them on AWS could count as "exporting" them).
endlessvoid94 15y ago
I was unable to find a public link somewhere. Is it actually open source and available for download?
- viraptor 15y ago
  Kinda - it's openstack (and probably loads of their custom proprietary code).
  - anotherjesse 15y ago
    No proprietary code. 100% open source
    - viraptor 15y ago
      Can you point at some confirmation of it? I could barely find the name "openstack" anywhere on their site and the project itself is pretty basic really (unless they follow trunk).
crazymik3 15y ago
Gotta love the Digg and Delicious icons in the footer.
gcb 15y ago
from their FAQ Q Who can use Nebula? A Nebula is available to NASA’s internal project groups. Nebula is not available for use by private industry or by the public. Nebula is also currently acting as a test-bed for Federal Cloud Computing technology for The Office of Management

54 points by ajray 15y ago

en1ma 15y ago

I'm surprised no one has commented yet. This is pretty freaking awesome.

EricBurnett 15y ago
I'm trying to figure out exactly what this is, to be honest. To me it looks like their version of Amazon Web Services, for sharing compute resources exclusively within their community. But I can't tell whether it's just providing secure hardware to throw VMs at or if they've built the support infrastructure like a fault tolerant file system as well. Edit: From http://nebula.nasa.gov/services/ http://nebula.nasa.gov/services/ it appears they have a distributed file system, but otherwise it's simply a set of networked machines.

dillona 15y ago

How is this related to the OpenStack project? I know NASA was an original partner in that

viraptor 15y ago
From the description it seems like exactly what OpenStack provides (even regarding architecture, access to own network, etc.). The only place where it's explicitly mentioned is the blog (http://nebula.nasa.gov/blog/2011/may/nebula-team-releases-new-features-and-fixes/ http://nebula.nasa.gov/blog/2011/may/nebula-team-releases-ne...) They might be running something more recent than Bexar though, since that one's rather old and doesn't provide many features required for large-scale operation.

zitterbewegung 15y ago

Looks cool. Is the advantage to this that its close to Nasa datasets?

dmoney 15y ago
The advantage is probably just that it's owned by NASA rather than by a private entity. This could allow it to be used for sensitive or classified applications, or for space related applications (which could be classed as munitions, which [I'm not a lawyer, but i'm guessing...] means putting them on AWS could count as "exporting" them).

endlessvoid94 15y ago

I was unable to find a public link somewhere. Is it actually open source and available for download?

viraptor 15y ago
Kinda - it's openstack (and probably loads of their custom proprietary code).
- anotherjesse 15y ago
  No proprietary code. 100% open source
  - viraptor 15y ago
    Can you point at some confirmation of it? I could barely find the name "openstack" anywhere on their site and the project itself is pretty basic really (unless they follow trunk).

crazymik3 15y ago

Gotta love the Digg and Delicious icons in the footer.

gcb 15y ago

from their FAQ Q Who can use Nebula? A Nebula is available to NASA’s internal project groups. Nebula is not available for use by private industry or by the public. Nebula is also currently acting as a test-bed for Federal Cloud Computing technology for The Office of Management