Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL) is home to a number of cloud-related projects, including its private cloud Magellan and extensive experimentation with public cloud offerings, including Cluster Compute Instances, which Amazon Web Services offers to those with HPC applications.
The Magellan cloud computing project is delivering some interesting results as it continues to alter the cloud environment in order to take different cloud models to task. The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Centers (NERSC) in conjunction with Argonne National Laboratory launched a computational cloud testbed called Magellan in October, 2009 with funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act via the U.S. Department of Energy.
The goal of the joint effort of is to look at the cost and energy benefits and drawbacks to the cloud computing paradigm for scientists, specifically those working on government-funded projects. The range of application areas that are either already being explored or are set to enter the cloud covers several scientific computing arenas, including genomics and climate research and applied mathematics.
Over the last several months we’ve been bringing some news about Magellan and other research initiatives at the center, often citing Kathy Yelick, NERSC Director. Yelick was also a keynote speaker at the recent ISC Cloud event in Frankfurt, Germany where she gave a lengthy presentation about clouds for HPC.
Although the following short video isn’t all about cloud computing research at LBNL/NERSC, it is an informative overview about some other research endeavors at the lab. Aside from that, it’s always useful to put faces with the names when it comes to notable figures we talk about.