Visit additional Tabor Communication Publications October 13,
2009 Like many organizations that rely on industrial-strength
datacenters, the US Department of Energy (DOE) would like to
know if cloud computing can make its life easier. To answer that
question, the DOE is launching a $32 million program to study
how scientific codes can make use of cloud technology. Called
Magellan, the program will be funded by the American Recovery
and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), with the money to be split equally
between the the two DOE centers that will be conducting the
work: the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) at
Argonne National Laboratory and the National Energy Research
Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory. One of the major questions the study hopes
to answer is how well the DOE's mid-range scientific workloads
match up with various cloud architectures and how those
architectures could be optimized for HPC applications. Today
most public clouds lack the network performa