The NSF has awarded the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego a two-year, $450K grant to find out how cloud computing might benefit scientific researchers.
The big question is whether cloud computing might make more sense to use for managing huge data sets currently handled by more static, relational database-oriented models.
The research will focus on exploiting the Cluster Exploratory (CLuE), a cloud computing resource launched by Google and IBM in late 2007.
“The broader impact of this research will be to reassess how scientific data archives are implemented, and how data sets are hosted and served to the scientific community at large, using on-demand and dynamic approaches for provisioning data sets as opposed to the current static approach,” said SDSC Distinguished Scientist Chaitan Baru, who is heading the SDSC research project, in a statement. “This project has the potential to offer scientific researchers compute clouds as a complement to conventional supercomputing architectures used today, while creating new tools and techniques for commercial cloud computing.”
