Michael Little
NASA Langley Research Center
Cloud Computing at NASA: More Science in the same Budget

Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Building 3 Auditorium - 11:00 AM
(Coffee and cookies at 10:30 AM)

The NASA Nebula system was hailed as a revolutionary approach to supplying computing capabilities to the Agency. Would it work to support the science and engineering computing needs of the Mission Directorates? What characteristics would lead an application to running on the Cloud and which ones make it a poor match? After 5 months of intensive testing by over 100 NASA researchers, what did we learn? Inquiring minds want to know.

Michael Little is Advanced Development Lead at the Atmospheric Science Data Center at NASA Langley Research Center. Mike has managed computing technology programs at NASA for almost 21 years, first in the Office of Aeronautics at NASA Headquarters and then later at NASA Langley Research Center, including the CERES instrument and the Atmospheric Science Data Center. He also worked at the NextGen Air Transportation Joint Planning and Development Office. Prior to NASA, Mike worked on the 1990 Census, the Air Force Consolidated Space Operations Center in Colorado Springs, US Navy and Marine Corps system development programs.

For the past year, Mike Little has been assigned to the Science Mission Directorate as the Acting High End Computing Program Engineer. During this assignment, SMD and the NASA CIO collaborated on an evaluation of the Nebula Cloud Computing Capability as a tool to do more science within the same budget. Working in conjunction with the High End Computing Capability at Ames and the National Center for Climate Simulation at Goddard as well the CIO's office at JPL, Mr. Little drove the study to completion in preparation for an FY12 budget decision. As part of this testing, the Amazon Web Services Cloud and Microsoft's Azure system were also evaluated for comparison.

IS&T Colloquium Committee Host: Jim Fischer

Sign language interpreter upon request: 301-286-7040