As part of the space agency’s highly competitive Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) award program, NASA has made a two-year $600,000 contract with Parabon Computation, who will deliver a first-of-its-kind software service that enables scientists and engineers to interactively develop, execute and collaborate on modeling and simulation (M&S) applications from any standard web browser.

The new Modeling and Simulation as a Service (M&SaaS) solution will provide web-based Platform as a Service tools. These tools – such as a browser-based source code editor, online collaboration utilities, and virtualized build and runtime environment management interfaces – will allow developers to more efficiently create and modify a wide variety of high-performance computing (HPC) applications. In addition, the web-centric nature of the project will allow researchers around the world to work together seamlessly, removing barriers that have heretofore hampered scientific collaboration, dramatically increasing productivity for NASA and other organizations.

Parabon says the Web-based platform will be built upon its Frontier Grid software, which can take idle computing capacity from many machines and manage it as one large computational grid, with applications running on virtual machines.

Frontier can be used to harness the unused CPU power of desktops and servers, Parabon CEO Steven Armentrout notes.

“I believe they [NASA] have 80,000 desktops,” he says. “If they were to put Frontier on all 80,000 they would have one of the fastest supercomputers in the world.”

Although the system will initially run climate models, it can be used for many types of scientific research. [NASA building cloud service for climate modeling]

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Tags | climate, cloud computing, m&saas, nasa, Saas