Category Archives: NASA

Intel, Jason Waxman, Jonathan Bryce, NASA, News & Analysis, Open Source, OpenStack, Rackspace, Scott Crenshaw

Rackspace, Intel to coordinate ‘world’s largest OpenStack dev team’

Intel and Rackspace claim the centre will house the world's largest OpenStack development team

Intel and Rackspace claim the centre will house the world’s largest OpenStack development team

Rackspace and Intel are teaming up to launch an OpenStack Innovation Centre aimed at bolstering upstream development of the cloud platform.

The centre, housed at Rackspace’s corporate HQ in San Antonio, Texas, will bring together technical specialists from Rackspace and Intel to co-develop new features and functions for OpenStack and fix bugs in the code base, with the fruits of their efforts being contributed back upstream.

The companies will also offer OpenStack training to engineers and developers; they claim the centre will house the world’s largest dedicated OpenStack development team.

“We are excited to collaborate with Intel and look forward to working with the OpenStack community to make the world’s leading open-source cloud operating system even stronger,” said Scott Crenshaw, senior vice president of product and strategy at Rackspace.

“We don’t create proprietary OpenStack distributions.  Rackspace delivers its customers four-nines availability using entirely upstream trunk code. All of the Innovation Centre’s contributions will be made available freely, to everyone,” Crenshaw said.

Jason Waxman, vice president of the Cloud Platforms Group at Intel said: “This announcement demonstrates our continued support and commitment to open source projects. Our ongoing collaboration with Rackspace and the OpenStack community represents an ideal opportunity to accelerate the enterprise appeal of OpenStack.”

OpenStack, which this week celebrated its fifth anniversary, was founded by a few engineers from Rackspace and NASA but has since swelled to more than 520 member companies and 27,000 individual contributors globally. While the open source cloud platform is young, it has matured significantly during its brief existence and has become a defacto cloud standard embraced by many if not most of the big IT incumbents.

“The community’s goal is to foster collaboration and spur innovation that drives broad adoption,” said Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation. “The depth of experience and community engagement that Rackspace and Intel offer makes this an exciting project, as the code contributions and large-scale testing will benefit everyone who uses OpenStack.”

AWS, BlueMix, hackathon, IBM, NASA, Watson

IBM, NASA team on cloud, open data app code-a-thon

NASA is teaming up with IBM to host a code-a-thon for developers interested in supporting space exploration through apps

NASA is teaming up with IBM to host a code-a-thon for developers interested in supporting space exploration through apps

IBM and NASA are partnering on the space agency’s Space App Challenge, which will see participating developers build applications that help solve space exploration challenges.

The goal is to get developers building applications that can be used to solve space exploration-related challenges using cloud-based services and publicly available data sets. Some initial applications include a system that uses data aggregators and analytics to help NASA tracks asteroids, and an app that uses senor data streams to guide movement for robots.

As part of the deal IBM will be offering up its Bluemix platform-as-a-service and Watson analytics for developers participating with the three-day code-a-thon, which is being coordinated by the space agency online; more than 10,000 developers are expected to participate across 136 cities.

The company also plans to allocate IBM staff to offer best-practice development tutorials for handling some of its cloud and big data technologies.

NASA is making available datasets from over 200 data sources including services and tools supplied through real-life NASA missions and technology.

“The NASA International Space Apps Challenge is at the forefront of innovation, providing real-world examples of how technology can be used to by the best and brightest developers in the world to solve some of the most daunting challenges facing our civilization,” said Sandy Carter, general manager, cloud ecosystem and developers, IBM.

“Using the IBM Cloud, IBM is making it easier for developers to solve NASA challenges by helping them leverage and make sense of data in ways that wouldn’t have been possible even just a few years ago,” Carter said.

The space agency has previously partnered with other cloud provider on similar initiatives. Last year NASA partnered with Amazon Web Service to host terabytes worth of climate and earth sciences satellite data to promote community-driven research and innovation using its data.