Energy Department plans $32 million cloud experiment

The Department of Energy is moving to the cloud. Using $32 million from the economic stimulus bill, the department plans to embark on an experiment to determine whether an internal cloud computing system can be effectively be used by scientists at its national labs.

The project is called Magellan, and will be used at the Argonne and Lawrence Berkeley National Labs. Some of the applications will include protein structure analysis, power grid simulations, and image processing for materials structure analysis. Informationweek.com reports that the project calls for a large portion of the money to go toward fixed-asset computer hardware, including thousands of servers with Intel Nehalen microprocessors.

The department also plans to explore commercial offerings from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft to supplement its internal systems, and to make its cloud storage available to the scientific community as a shared service.

The Magellan clouds project is slated to be operating by early next year.

For more on DOE and the cloud:
- see this InformationWeek article

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