SDSC’s New Storage Cloud: ‘Flickr for Scientific Data’ by Michael Feldman.
From the post:
Last month, the San Diego Supercomputer Center launched what it believes is “the largest academic-based cloud storage system in the U.S.” The infrastructure is designed to serve the country’s research community and will be available to scientists and engineers from essentially any government agency that needs to archive and share super-sized data sets.
Certainly the need for such a service exists. The modern practice of science is a community activity and the way researchers collaborate is by sharing their data. Before the emergence of cloud, the main way to accomplish that was via emails and sending manuscripts back and forth over the internet. But with the coalescence of some old and new technologies, there are now economically viable ways for sharing really large amounts of data with colleagues.
In the press release describing the storage cloud, SDSC director Michael Norman described it thusly: “We believe that the SDSC Cloud may well revolutionize how data is preserved and shared among researchers, especially massive datasets that are becoming more prevalent in this new era of data-intensive research and computing.” Or as he told us more succinctly, “I think of it as Flickr for scientific data.”
The article ends with:
Whether the center’s roll-your-own cloud will be able to compete against commercial clouds on a long-term basis remains to be seen. One of the reasons a relatively small organization like SDSC can even build such a beast today is thanks in large part to the availability of cheap commodity hardware and the native expertise at the center to build high-end storage systems from parts.
There is also OpenStack — an open-source cloud OS that the SDSC is using as the basis of their offering. Besides being essentially free for the taking, the non-proprietary nature of OpenStack also means the center will not be locked into any particular software or hardware vendors down the road.
“With OpenStack going open source, it’s now possible for anybody to set up a little cloud business,” explains Norman “We’re just doing it in an academic environment.”
From a long term need/employment situation, having lots of “little cloud” businesses, each with its own semantics, isn’t a bad thing.
It does make me wonder to what degree the ability to have more semantics accessible increases the semantic resistance (not the Newcomb word, dissonance perhaps?) or it is simply more evident. That is the overall level of semantic dissonance is the same, but the WWW, etc. has increased the rate at which we encounter it.
Different companies always had different database semantics, for example, but the only way to encounter it was to either change jobs or merge the companies, both of which were one on one events. Now it is easy to encounter multiple database semantics in a single day or hour, etc.