The core technology developed for NASA's Nebula cloud computing platform has been selected as a contributor for OpenStack, a newly launched open source cloud computing initiative. It will pull together more than 25 companies to play a key role in driving cloud computing standards for interoperability and portability.

Cloud computing is a way to deliver computing resources, such as software, storage and virtual computing power, as services over the Internet. NASA launched the Nebula cloud computing platform to provide agency researchers with a range of services powerful enough to manage NASA's large-scale scientific data sets. Nebula offers unparalleled compute capability, storage and bandwidth to users at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., and Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

"We hope that OpenStack will form the foundation of a new open source cloud ecosystem," said NASA chief technology officer for Information Technology Chris C. Kemp. "With Nebula technology at the core of OpenStack, NASA will be uniquely positioned to drive standards that will ensure products and services powered by OpenStack will meet federal interoperability, portability, and security requirements."

OpenStack is the first large-scale open source cloud project of its kind and is expected to gather significant momentum in the cloud and open source communities.

"Nebula technology was selected for inclusion in the OpenStack project because of its massively scalable architecture and the high quality of its code," said Jim Curry, director of OpenStack.

The announcement coincides with O'Reilly Media's Open Source Developers Conference, which is taking place in Portland, Ore., this week.

"Participating in OpenStack will allow NASA to tap into a well-established community of open source developers and enable us to benefit from crowd-sourced development efforts," said Raymond O'Brien, Nebula's program manager.

Nebula is an agency-wide program and was one of three flagship initiatives highlighted in NASA's Open Government Plan.

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