NASA

NASA has teamed up with Google to bolster its space research with the search giant's vast pools of storage and server power.

Speaking on a conference call today, NASA officials explained that the two organizations will work together on "large-scale data management," suggesting that Google's data centers will play their part in the space agency's future projects.

"We're in the business of space exploration and we're obtaining a lot of data," said Pete Worden, director of the NASA Ames Research Center, explaining that the agency is already generating "unbelievable" data from its Mars research.

Initially, the two organizations will make data from Mars and the Moon available on the Web. "It's designed to make the data that NASA has collected and will continue to collect in the future much more available to the public," said Worden.

NASA and Google are already collaborating on a project called Global Connection, which incorporates data and images from the space agency and National Geographic publications into a Google Earth-style Web interface. Global Connection was used to support disaster relief in the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, as well as last year's earthquake in Pakistan.Longer-term, though, NASA is clearly looking to exploit some of Google's data center capacity for its own research. The two organizations, for example, have signed an agreement for the search engine giant to build its own one million-square-foot facility within the NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field in California.

As ever, Google execs on today's call were cagey about what will go into this site. "We're still in the preliminary planning stages," said Megan Smith, Google's business development director.

The partnership provides further evidence, if any were needed, of Google's massive storage and compute resources. Although the search giant is tight-lipped on the specifics of its data center infrastructure, the firm is said to use more than 10,000 standard Linux servers to support its search engine, located in 13 data centers dotted around the world.

The search giant's storage strategy involves a project code-named "Bigtable," according to a note on its Website. This is essentially a distributed storage system for managing structured data that is designed to scale to a massive size and involves Pbytes of data across thousands of commodity storage servers.

According to Google, many of its own products store data in Bigtable, including Web indexing, Google Earth, and Google Finance, although the search giant has not confirmed which vendors it uses for the system. It now appears, though, that NASA will tap into this storage resource at some point in the future.SEC documents show Google spent more than $1.5 billion on property and equipment in the nine months ending September 30, 2006, almost triple the $592 million spent in the same period last year. And at least one Google exec has confirmed that the company consumes storage, compute power, and bandwidth at an alarming rate. (See Google Groans Under Data Strain.)

NASA's AMES Research Center is a massive consumer of storage and compute power in its own right, which likely prompted the organization to link up with NASA. The Center recently revealed how it had spent more than $3 million over the last few months to add the capacity and bandwidth necessary to keep its Columbia supercomputer up and running. (See NASA Upgrades Supercomputer.)

That project included adding 600 Tbytes of disk connected to DataDirect S2A9550 SANs, 20 Sun StorageTek T10000 tape libraries, and 320 ports of 4-Gbit/s Brocade Fibre Channel switches. (See DataDirect Intros Solutions and Sun Launches Tape Libraries.) Named in memory of the fallen Space Shuttle astronauts, Columbia supports all of NASA's space launches and research and is connected to 1.1 Pbytes of storage, including a 440-Tbytes SGI InfiniteStorage SAN installed when it launched in 2004. (See SGI, Intel Build NASA Supercomputer.)

Google, though, unlike NASA, is not subject to the budget constraints imposed by the federal government, so it makes sense for the space agency to team up with the search specialist in return for collaboration on projects such as Global Connection.

The space agency is also likely to gain an insight into some of the cutting-edge data management techniques used by the notoriously secretive search specialist. Google, for example, is currently looking to build "artificial intelligence" into its data center infrastructure in an effort to understand every query it receives. In the search giant's 2005 annual report, released earlier this year, Google execs predicted that this requires "both a lot of computation and a lot of data."James Rogers, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch