Number Crunching Made Easy.(Science and Technology; TECHTONIC SHIFTS)(cloud computing)

Byline: Christopher Werth

Cloud computing is making high-end computing readily available to researchers in rich and poor nations alike.

A dwindling water supply spells disaster for the residents of Brazil's arid Northeast, who live by subsistence agriculture. Droughts have become longer and more frequent, and every year more families set off for the urban slums. Predicting how rainfall patterns will shift in a few years and how it will affect aquifers and agricultural output has become an urgent task. Civil engineers need to know where to build reservoirs and how much water they should hold. But this kind of local climate modeling requires a lot of number crunching, and supercomputers are rare in these parts.

To get around this hurdle, a group of universities and government labs, called SegHidro (which means "water security"), pooled the computing resources in labs scattered throughout the country. Using software called OurGrid, they adapt global climate models to local conditions, parceling out pieces of the massive job to little computers in the network. This kind of collaboration is getting a big boost from new so-called cloud-computing services from Amazon, Google and Microsoft. By driving down the cost of scientific computation, it promises to be a boon to researchers in rich and poor nations.

Distributing big research computing tasks via the Web isn't new--for years scientists have been divvying up projects among global networks of volunteers who make their PCs available for data crunching. But setting up these arrangements is still costly and cumbersome, and requires computer expertise. This means that a lot of worthy but little-known projects--such as research on specific strains of antiretroviral-resistant HIV found only in parts of Africa and South America, or the type of local climate modeling that SegHidro carries out--have fallen by the wayside. Cloud computing, though, is beginning to put the power of big data centers at the fingertips of anybody with a Web browser.

Cloud computing has some attractive qualities for scientific researchers. It delivers data storage and processing as a service, rather than software that's loaded onto a hard drive, or something that sits on a desk somewhere. Information is held on massive data centers spread all over the world, and available upon request. In the cloud, the "supercomputer" exists virtually, meaning no clunky hardware; the software interface is easy to use; and scientists have access to their data and simulations from just about anywhere by simply logging in. Amazon has been leading the way in on-demand computing for the past decade, invaluable for organizations with large databases that don't necessarily want to hire an IT department. The service is flexible and ...