DISA CIO: Cloud Computing ‘Something We Absolutely Have to Do’

By Derrick Harris

October 20, 2008

Cloud computing has its share of naysayers, no doubt, but John Garing is not among them.

Garing, CIO of the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), believes cloud computing will be a driving force in the Department of Defense (DoD). In fact, Garing says that although he shares some of the concerns espoused by the IT media (such as the danger of hosting multiple applications on a single platform), he, personally, is more than optimistic, calling cloud computing “something we absolutely have to do.”

“We have seen what … Amazon [and] Google have done, and it seems to us that there is a need for that,” he explains. “For example, if you deploy a force somewhere in the world for disaster relief … or a special operations team, they ought to be able to connect to the network like you or I can from home, and bring together or compose … the services and information they need for what they’re doing at that particular place and time, rather than have to connect to a bunch of applications.”

Step 1: RACE

The first step in this journey kicked off on Oct. 14, when DISA’s RACE (Rapid Access Computing Environment) infrastructure went live. RACE is a shared services cloud that gives DISA customers on-demand, self-service access to developmental testing resources. Although RACE is located entirely within DISA’s walls, customers still get the public cloud experience with a Web portal, 24-hour-a-day availability, a service catalog and a credit card payment option. RACE supports applications built on either the LAMP or Windows stacks.

Like most cloud computing initiatives, efficiency and cost-savings were big drivers of RACE. Garing says the ability for users to compose services in minutes and pay for the testing infrastructure only as they use it is a better option than the “elaborate process” of writing a funding document, doing an interdepartmental requisition for funds transferred and so on. A week ago, he saw someone experimenting on RACE provision a Web site and do the funds transfer in only 7 minutes. “That’s pretty impressive for the Department of Defense, or the federal government,” he jokes. “Seven months would be more like it.”

In terms of cost, Garing believes the cloud model must be “a whole lot cheaper than the way we do business traditionally” because it helps avoid a large capital investment. The old acquisition model includes over-provisioning infrastructure for each application to meet uncertain demand, resulting in untold quantities of idle resources. Additionally, Garing says, DISA has a full cost recovery policy for IT expenditures. With a five-year straight-line depreciation period and two-year average contracts, DISA’s users do not have much time to recover their costs. With RACE, however, all they have to do is turn resources on and off in DISA’s datacenters.

Alfred Rivera, director of computing services for DISA, says the foundation of RACE is the agency’s capacity on demand initiative. The physical resources for RACE are located in DISA’s datacenters, but it has entered into contracts with various vendors to buy capacity “by the drink,” with the vendors retaining capital ownership of the boxes. He elaborated that this is a “joint capacity” relationship where DISA manages capacity utilization in support of its customers, and the vendors ensure DISA has the capacity to meet its growth demands.

For now, the processing contracts for RACE belong to HP, Sun, ViON and Apptis, with ViON also winning the storage contract.

A second-order effect of the cloud initiative, says Rivera, is the ability to put in place a standard, homogenous architecture, which further reduces costs and complexity. Garing says the traditional procedure is that customers go to Rivera’s Computing Services Directorate to host their applications, and are charged for the services they want. However, he added, configurations vary greatly depending on which division is develops the applications and which contractors they choose to work with. With RACE, he says, departments need to specify with contractors that applications must conform to either LAMP or Windows.

This being the DoD, however, it should come as no surprise that performance — specifically as it relates to agility and speed — also is of the utmost importance. Garing says that because the DoD cannot always predict where its forces will be deployed, or for what purpose, the agency needs a platform that can deliver on these characteristics. “It’s all about the war fighter,” he stated. “Everything is about the war fighter and those other people at the edge who need to have information to do their jobs.” The cloud model will edge users to focus their talents on innovation rather than on worrying about storage, databases or computing power, he added.

Just a Testing Environment… For Now

Although RACE is strictly a development and testing environment for the time being, DISA definitely has bigger things in mind. “It’s the germ upon which we will grow this more important cloud, this platform,” says Garing.

Rivera says DISA is taking “baby steps” right now, addressing near-term issues like security while moving “very carefully” toward new architectures, technologies and uses to support departmental customers and war fighters. On the agenda, once security is hammered out and a seamless transition plan is in place, is rolling out a production environment. Infrastructure-wise, Rivera says the end game is “a finite architecture that is homogenous,” which probably will include Solaris support for war fighters, and an IBM presence.

He added that DISA also is looking to build a “Federated Development Certification Environment”  — a foundational set of applications and services on top of which customers can develop edge-type tools for publishing information and getting access to data stores. And although RACE currently is focused on defense support, Rivera says DoD back office support is not out of the question.

Garing agrees, citing increasing pressure and acquiescence to enterprise-type services within the DoD as driving RACE’s use in broader environments. However, he says, any new services will always be under the control of the Computing Services Directorate, and the goal of encouraging standard application types will remain.

Public Clouds: Tempting, but Dangerous

What are the prospects of DISA acquiring resources from a public cloud provider? “I don’t see it happening any time soon,” says Garing.

But that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t like it to. Garing says DISA has talked to providers like Google, Amazon and Salesforce.com, and really likes what it has seen, but one of the strengths of those clouds is that you can’t tell where data is being processed, and “we are not at a level of sophistication where we would accept that.” Possible solutions include carving off part of a public cloud under a .mil domain or having someone build DISA its own cloud (both of which have been proposed and discussed), but that’s not really the point, Garing says. “The dilemma is [that] the strengths of these public clouds are incredible, in my view,” he explains. “To take one of those — an element of it, an aspect of it, a piece of it — and put it inside our firewall would seem to me to start to sub-optimize the benefits of the cloud that you’re trying to use.”

Garing draws an “irresistible force versus immovable object” analogy to illustrate more clearly DISA’s internal dilemma. In this case, he says, the irresistible force is the “incredible thirst for collaboration and information-sharing that Web 2.0 tools and many young people have brought on board,” and the immovable object is security — “and those two clash frequently.” DISA’s job, particularly that of the Computing Services Directorate, is to arbitrate that clash and make good risk decisions, he says. Often times, this means looking at the worst-case scenario and taking a conservative route, because while the agency’s decisions are made inside the Washington, D.C., beltway, the ultimate consideration has to be what kind of risk the operational commander is willing to take.

“It’s like a big, beautiful plum hanging out there [that] we’d like to grab, but it’s like the fruit of the poison vine almost,” says Garing. “You’ve got to be so careful.”


On-Demand Enterprise will follow this look at the Department of Defense’s cloud computing strategy with a piece on how the federal government as a whole might adopt cloud computing technologies.

Subscribe to HPCwire's Weekly Update!

Be the most informed person in the room! Stay ahead of the tech trends with industry updates delivered to you every week!

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion XL — were added to the benchmark suite as MLPerf continues Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing power it brings to artificial intelligence.  Nvidia's DGX Read more…

Call for Participation in Workshop on Potential NSF CISE Quantum Initiative

March 26, 2024

Editor’s Note: Next month there will be a workshop to discuss what a quantum initiative led by NSF’s Computer, Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate could entail. The details are posted below in a Ca Read more…

Waseda U. Researchers Reports New Quantum Algorithm for Speeding Optimization

March 25, 2024

Optimization problems cover a wide range of applications and are often cited as good candidates for quantum computing. However, the execution time for constrained combinatorial optimization applications on quantum device Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at the network layer threatens to make bigger and brawnier pro Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HBM3E memory as well as the the ability to train 1 trillion pa Read more…

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing po Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HB Read more…

Nvidia Looks to Accelerate GenAI Adoption with NIM

March 19, 2024

Today at the GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia launched a new offering aimed at helping customers quickly deploy their generative AI applications in a secure, s Read more…

The Generative AI Future Is Now, Nvidia’s Huang Says

March 19, 2024

We are in the early days of a transformative shift in how business gets done thanks to the advent of generative AI, according to Nvidia CEO and cofounder Jensen Read more…

Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU Can Train AI Models with Trillions of Parameters

March 18, 2024

Nvidia's latest and fastest GPU, codenamed Blackwell, is here and will underpin the company's AI plans this year. The chip offers performance improvements from Read more…

Nvidia Showcases Quantum Cloud, Expanding Quantum Portfolio at GTC24

March 18, 2024

Nvidia’s barrage of quantum news at GTC24 this week includes new products, signature collaborations, and a new Nvidia Quantum Cloud for quantum developers. Wh Read more…

Alibaba Shuts Down its Quantum Computing Effort

November 30, 2023

In case you missed it, China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba has shut down its quantum computing research effort. It’s not entirely clear what drove the change. Read more…

Nvidia H100: Are 550,000 GPUs Enough for This Year?

August 17, 2023

The GPU Squeeze continues to place a premium on Nvidia H100 GPUs. In a recent Financial Times article, Nvidia reports that it expects to ship 550,000 of its lat Read more…

Shutterstock 1285747942

AMD’s Horsepower-packed MI300X GPU Beats Nvidia’s Upcoming H200

December 7, 2023

AMD and Nvidia are locked in an AI performance battle – much like the gaming GPU performance clash the companies have waged for decades. AMD has claimed it Read more…

DoD Takes a Long View of Quantum Computing

December 19, 2023

Given the large sums tied to expensive weapon systems – think $100-million-plus per F-35 fighter – it’s easy to forget the U.S. Department of Defense is a Read more…

Synopsys Eats Ansys: Does HPC Get Indigestion?

February 8, 2024

Recently, it was announced that Synopsys is buying HPC tool developer Ansys. Started in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1970 as Swanson Analysis Systems, Inc. (SASI) by John Swanson (and eventually renamed), Ansys serves the CAE (Computer Aided Engineering)/multiphysics engineering simulation market. Read more…

Choosing the Right GPU for LLM Inference and Training

December 11, 2023

Accelerating the training and inference processes of deep learning models is crucial for unleashing their true potential and NVIDIA GPUs have emerged as a game- Read more…

Intel’s Server and PC Chip Development Will Blur After 2025

January 15, 2024

Intel's dealing with much more than chip rivals breathing down its neck; it is simultaneously integrating a bevy of new technologies such as chiplets, artificia Read more…

Baidu Exits Quantum, Closely Following Alibaba’s Earlier Move

January 5, 2024

Reuters reported this week that Baidu, China’s giant e-commerce and services provider, is exiting the quantum computing development arena. Reuters reported � Read more…

Leading Solution Providers

Contributors

Comparing NVIDIA A100 and NVIDIA L40S: Which GPU is Ideal for AI and Graphics-Intensive Workloads?

October 30, 2023

With long lead times for the NVIDIA H100 and A100 GPUs, many organizations are looking at the new NVIDIA L40S GPU, which it’s a new GPU optimized for AI and g Read more…

Shutterstock 1179408610

Google Addresses the Mysteries of Its Hypercomputer 

December 28, 2023

When Google launched its Hypercomputer earlier this month (December 2023), the first reaction was, "Say what?" It turns out that the Hypercomputer is Google's t Read more…

AMD MI3000A

How AMD May Get Across the CUDA Moat

October 5, 2023

When discussing GenAI, the term "GPU" almost always enters the conversation and the topic often moves toward performance and access. Interestingly, the word "GPU" is assumed to mean "Nvidia" products. (As an aside, the popular Nvidia hardware used in GenAI are not technically... Read more…

Shutterstock 1606064203

Meta’s Zuckerberg Puts Its AI Future in the Hands of 600,000 GPUs

January 25, 2024

In under two minutes, Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, laid out the company's AI plans, which included a plan to build an artificial intelligence system with the eq Read more…

Google Introduces ‘Hypercomputer’ to Its AI Infrastructure

December 11, 2023

Google ran out of monikers to describe its new AI system released on December 7. Supercomputer perhaps wasn't an apt description, so it settled on Hypercomputer Read more…

China Is All In on a RISC-V Future

January 8, 2024

The state of RISC-V in China was discussed in a recent report released by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The report, entitled "E Read more…

Intel Won’t Have a Xeon Max Chip with New Emerald Rapids CPU

December 14, 2023

As expected, Intel officially announced its 5th generation Xeon server chips codenamed Emerald Rapids at an event in New York City, where the focus was really o Read more…

IBM Quantum Summit: Two New QPUs, Upgraded Qiskit, 10-year Roadmap and More

December 4, 2023

IBM kicks off its annual Quantum Summit today and will announce a broad range of advances including its much-anticipated 1121-qubit Condor QPU, a smaller 133-qu Read more…

  • arrow
  • Click Here for More Headlines
  • arrow
HPCwire