The National Science Foundation (NSF) is investing US$20 million to build two test clouds for scientists to experiment on new cloud computing architectures.

Cloud computing is the foremost method of providing infrastructure for internet services.

Advanced cloud computing architecture will allow support for new innovations like real-time and safety-critical applications used in power grids and transportation systems.

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The NSF is investing US$10 million each to two cloud computing companies -- CloudLab and Chameleon -- to assist scientists discover the best hardware, processors and distributed designs for different computing challenges.

Chameleon will have 650 cloud nodes with 5 petabytes of storage. Researchers will be able to use the custom clouds to test different cloud architectures with a wide range of problems.

This test bed will allow for experimentation that could improve the reliability, security and performance of cloud hardware.

Chameleon's test bed will adapt a wide range of experimental needs.

The second company, CloudLab, will have 15,000 processing cores and 1 petabyte of storage at its three data centers. Each of the centers will be handling different hardware and different experimentation.

Researchers in CloudLab will assist in developing clouds with applications that will directly benefit the public in areas of national priority such as real-time disaster response or the security of private data like medical records.

The team partner with three vendors, HP, Dell, and Cisco, to provide cutting-edge platforms for researching.

It is NSF's hope that CloudLab will assist in thousands of virtual experiments for researchers.

The ultimate goal of the NFSCloud program to advance cloud computing.

NSF will develop new concepts, methods and technologies to enable infrastructure design and ramp-up activities and will demonstrate the readiness for full-fledged execution.

The second part of the program will be the full staffing and operation of the projects.

TagsNational Science Foundation, Chameleon, NSF, CloudLab