Speaking at GigaOM’s Structure Europe conference in Amsterdam on Wednesday, Robert Jenkins of CloudSigma explained that “when you give people the data, you don’t know the end result but it comes up with a lot of positive outcomes.”

Jenkins gave the example of the World Health Organization tapping into data from the European Space Agency in order to improve mosquito eradication efforts in Nigeria. These type of collaborations are possible in part thanks to CloudSigma and other private companies that are helping to supply the computing power required to collect and parse data across Europe.

Ensuring that publicly funded-research produces public data has also resulted in an eco-system of small and media enterprises, according to Bob Jones of CERN who joined Jenkins at the event. Jones said this eco-system and the power of the cloud is producing the type of inter-disciplinary algorithms that are necessary to solve current science and policy problems.

Moderator Kris Tuttle, who is CEO of SoundView Technology Group, asked how to determine a common resource unit or module when working in such a vast “federated cloud.” Jenkins said the answer is to focus on deliverables rather than resource units, offering the example of a gene sequencing project in which the customer simply cares about how long it will take to get the job done rather than the specifics of the implementation process.

The speakers also noted that working in the European science cloud also provides practice and credibility for companies that want to serve private sector industries like finance, media and biotech.

Finally, the discussion produced some mind-boggling science stats like the fact that the Helix Nebula is now using 200,000 CPUs to continuously churn data. Jones also noted that maintenance windows are 18 months due to the fact that much of the work is occurring near a temperature of 270 kelvin — meaning that machines have to be slowly warmed up from a state of near absolute zero.

Check out the rest of our Structure Europe 2012 coverage here. A video recording of the session follows below.

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Large Hadron Collider

Scientists have a limitless hunger for computing power and storage. That’s why three European agencies — CERN, the force behind the Large Hadron Collider; the European Molecular Biology Laboratory; and the European Space Agency — are cooking up a European science cloud to handle their compute-intensive workloads.

The Helix Nebula Science Cloud aims to bring enough firepower to solve very hard problems and deal with tons of data churned out by the second. As an example of the size of the task, CERN alone stores about 15 petabytes of data per year, uses 150,000 CPUs continuously, and writes data at 6 GB per second.

“Physicists can consume as much compute power and storage as we can give them. There is so much data and so many ways to explore and mine that data, that we’re always looking for new techniques to increase that total capacity,” said Bob Jones, the head of CERN’s OpenLab in an interview. CERN, or the European Lab for Particle Physics, is based in Geneva and funded by European Union nations.

The project is backed by commercial partners including Atos, Capgemini, CloudSigma, Logica, Orange Business Systems, SAP, Telefonica, the Cloud Security Alliance and the OpenNebula project.

Up until now CERN has been using publicly owned infrastructure — 150 data centers in all — that contribute resources for LHD data. “We want to see if we can use commercial infrastructure as an additional resource,” Jones said. Like any organization, the group is trying to build in flexibility and maximize price performance.

Discussion around the project started last summer, and the group decided to use the new infrastructure initially for three projects. CERN will use the infrastructure to handle the Atlas Experiment, a particle physics project, at LHC. The European Molecular Biology Lab will use it in a new project to simplify the analysis of large genomes and the European Space Agency, working with two partners, will build an application to study earthquakes and volcanoes.

The first stage of the project is a two-year pilot building a cloud to handle those three applications.

This is a Europe-only cloud. “The initial drive is from these European research labs,” Jones said, “and one reason it’s ended up this way is this whole question of data security and access. We have to be certain wherever we start to use these resources that we have appropriate legislative backing.”

There has been a movement to build Europe-only clouds, with proponents usually invoking the U.S. Patriot Act as rationale. Because some European nations –notably Germany — have tougher privacy laws than those in the U.S., local companies want to make sure data in their data centers cannot be turned over to U.S. authorities.

As the prototyping continues, Jones said the group will look into bringing other research organizations and cloud providers aboard.

Photo courtesy of  Flickr user Image Editor

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