Nimbus and cloud computing meet STAR production demands
Friday, April 3, 2009 - 09:56
in Astronomy & Space
(PhysOrg.com) -- The advantages of cloud computing were dramatically illustrated last week by researchers working on the STAR nuclear physics experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider. New simulation results were needed for presentation at the Quark Matter physics conference; but all the computational resources were either committed to other tasks or did not support the environment needed for STAR computations. Fortunately, working with technology developed by the Nimbus team at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, the STAR researchers were able to dynamically provision virtual clusters on commercial cloud computers and run the additional computations just in time.