Recently, a report was made by the Magellan project regarding the possibilities and viable use of Cloud Computing for scientific purposes. Like most scientific reports, this contained a lot of Yes, No and Maybe but the bottom-line at the end of the report was that the DOE (US Department of Energy) thinks that its current DOE supercomputing centers are better equipped for scientific supercomputing. However, they also made it clear, in a particularly tactful manner, that they would gladly switch over to existing commercial Cloud Computing offerings provided that these offerings give them a little bit more in the way of personalization.
According to them, it wasn’t the fact that existing DOE supercomputing systems would be enough to fulfill current demand, but that current commercial Cloud Computing offerings such as Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) were just too generic for them to do their scientific analysis properly. Existing DOE supercomputer centers had more experienced face-to-face staff translating scientific hyperbole into meaningful questions as compared to the scientists having to frame such questions themselves using Amazon’s admittedly generic interface. The hint here is rather obvious for those seeking to be the next Cloud Supercomputing cluster (also a good idea for a startup) for the ever-growing needs of the scientific community: Make a custom wizard for scientists. More on this here
