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The National Resource Conservation Service was faced with somestaggering figures: more than 100 scientific modeling toolsdeployed to each and every one of its 12,500 planners, who werespread out in more than 2,000 offices. Each NRCS employee needs access to those applications as theytravel into the field to help farmers and ranchers determine howbest to handle the critical issues that affect their businesses andlivelihoods. But the NRCS, part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, realizedit had an increasingly costly and ineffective system on its hands. So in 2009, the NRCS started looking at cloud computing as a way tocentralize resources, cut costs, and provide a more scalable andflexible IT backbone for the organization and its thousands offield workers. The agency, though, needed a tool to help move its legacyapplications to the cloud. It developed the Cloud ServicesInnovation Platform (CSIP) to meet that goal. The CSIP is designed to facilitate the migration of existingscientific modeling applications to any Amazon EC2-compatibleinfrastructure-as-a-service cloud environment. One of its keycomponents is its ability to take an existing environmental modeland turn it into a Web service that can run in the cloud. The agency also sees compatibility of this open-sourceinfrastructure with commercial cloud-hosting offerings as critical,since that compatibility will enable both successfulproduction-level deployment and reliable availability on a stableoperational platform. The NRCS tested this new framework using Eucalyptus open-sourceprivate cloud software. Using the Eucalyptus-based CSIP, the NRCSdemonstrated that these environmental modeling tools could beeasily accessible as a Web service from the cloud. This capabilityhelps the agency deliver better support to farmers and ranchers byenabling, for example, an NRCS planner to simply use a mobile phonefrom the field to get answers to questions about soil erosion. The agency is using two criteria to evaluate the success of thisproject: whether computational services can be quickly establishedon an open-source infrastructure and then moved to a commercialcloud provider, and whether the procedure generates significantcost savings that make it a compelling option for futuredevelopment activities. So far, the NRCS is reporting successes on both fronts. It has beenable to set up legacy computational scientific models within a weekfor each one before moving them to commercial providers. Meanwhile,the agency is expecting to save money over its current server-farmapproach. The NRCS sees this project as an ongoing effort and expects toconstantly update the underlying open-source infrastructure to fitchanging development needs. Read more about the 2012 Computerworld Honors Laureates . Read more about Cloud Computing in Computerworld's Cloud Computing Topic Center . I am an expert from homedecorationsupplier.com, while we provides the quality product, such as China Removable Wall Stickers , Custom Car Stickers Manufacturer, Wall Sticker Clock,and more.
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