Nov. 12 — Cycle Computing, the leader in cloud computing orchestration software for Big Compute and Big Data, announced a collaboration with NASA to determine the biological mass of bushes and trees over the entire arid and semi-arid zone on the south side of the Sahara. NASA is using Cycle Computing software on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure to efficiently tackle larger questions than possible with NASA internal resources alone.

In a proposal to take part in the Head in the Clouds Program with AWS, Cycle Computing, and Intel Corp., Compton Tucker at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and Paul Morin at the University of Minnesota detailed plans to estimate the carbon stored and establish a baseline for later research on the expected carbon dioxide uptake on the south side of the Sahara. With the recent access to large amounts of high-resolution remote sensing data, it is now possible to measure biomass at the level of individual trees and bushes.

Tucker and Morin were initially using the Advanced Data Analytics Platform (ADAPT)—a private cloud within the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS). Like many private clouds, ADAPT is shared with a large number of other research projects, and the NASA team saw that additional computing power and storage capabilities were necessary to successfully conduct this research in a meaningful time frame.

“Measuring the carbon around the world is a very important issue and is extremely compute and data intensive,” said Daniel Duffy, High-Performance Computing Lead at the NCCS. “For such a compute- and data-intensive problem, it makes sense to leverage cloud computing that can quickly scale to meet the scientists’ requirements. Through partnering with industry leaders such as Cycle Computing, AWS, and Intel, NASA has been able to obtain results faster than previously possible and in a secure and cost-competitive way.”

The group is well on its way toward measuring the first study domain across Saharan Africa using a modest 8 terabytes of data and leveraging 200 virtual machines. These initial runs have proven the scalability of the cloud environment and its ability to accelerate the time to results and discovery. The initial scalability runs proved that all 11 study domains, approximately 100 terabytes of data, could be completed in the same amount of time it took for a single domain at a very competitive cost point.

“This type of research is what motivates us at Cycle to create software that helps more organizations like NASA leverage cloud computing to enable researchers to do their best work,” said Jason Stowe, CEO of Cycle Computing. “Whether it’s time to result limitations, flexibility of existing options, or overwhelmed internal infrastructure, cloud computing has proven to be an ideal fit for immediate, and secure access to solve that computing need.”

About The NASA Team

Tucker and Morin are extending earlier tree and bush mapping work published by Gonzalez, Tucker, and Sy entitled “Tree density and species decline in the African Sahel attributable to climate” in the Journal of Arid Environments in 2012.

The NCCS provides high-performance computing, storage, networking, and support services to meet the specialized needs for climate, weather, and other research at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (for more information see (http://www.nccs.nasa.gov). In addition to the NCCS, the Climate Model Data Services group (http://cds.nccs.nasa.gov) supported the data management for the high-resolution remote sensing data.

About Cycle Computing

Cycle Computing is the leader in cloud computing orchestration software for Big Compute and Big Data. The company believes that greater access to compute enables people to ask bigger questions, obtain faster answers, to help create a better world. Cycle Computing software leverages cloud resources to make computation in the cloud productive at any scale, by orchestrating workflows, managing data, balancing cloud options, and enabling users in a secure, controlled way. Since 2005, Cycle Computing software has been used to deploy virtual clusters and storage for Government, Universities, Fortune 500s, and all sizes of data driven, innovative companies like The Aerospace Corporation, Lockheed Martin, Purdue University, JP Morgan Chase and Pfizer leveraging millions of hours of cloud based computation.

—

Source: Cycle Computing