NASA to build cloud services

NEW YORK, USA: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is set to improve its climate research capabilities by creating a software-as-a-service interface for scientists and students who need to build complex climate models.

Storage-as-a-service: Cloud Storage

NASA selects Parabon Computation, a provider of grid computing software and services. The latter won a two-year, $600,000 contract from NASA.

As part of the space agency’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) award programme, Parabon will deliver a first-of-its-kind software service that enables scientists and engineers to interactively develop, execute and collaborate on modeling and simulation (M&S) applications from any standard web browser.

Built upon Parabon’s Frontier Grid Platform, which manages some of the largest computational grids, the new Modeling and Simulation as a Service (M&SaaS) solution will provide web-based platform as a service tools.

These tools – such as a browser-based source code editor, online collaboration utilities, and virtualized build and runtime environment management interfaces – will allow developers to more efficiently create and modify a wide variety of high-performance computing (HPC) applications.

Mike Seablom, who leads the Software Integration & Visualization Office, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said: “M&SaaS has the potential to revolutionize how scientific software is designed, developed, deployed and used. The fact that this solution is accessible from the browser means anyone anywhere will be able to help contribute to our understanding of Earth system science.”

Steven Armentrout, president and chief executive officer, Parabon, said: “NASA’s SBIR program is highly competitive and Parabon is proud to be recognized for this software innovation. We’re confident that the capabilities developed under this project will forever transform the way modeling and simulation is practiced. It’s a perfect example of what can be accomplished by combining our extensive grid computing capabilities with recent advances in cloud computing and other online service-oriented technologies.”