Tapping Private Sector Innovation

by catlett on January 12th, 2007

NASA, with as strong a history of technical innovation as any Federal agency, has been making the news recently initiating partnerships with Google, Inc. . Originally announced late last year without specific details, one of their first joint projects was detailed this week - applying Google search technology to help scientists process, organize, and analyze the large-scale streams of data coming from the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), located in Chile.

Earlier last year the data produced by NASA’s Stardust spacecraft was made available for “crowdsource” style analysis by UC Berkeley’s Stardust@home project. Interestingly, Berkeley partnered with another private sector innovator - Amazon - to use Amazon’s S3 web services based storage to store the millions of images resulting from the Stardust project.

These are excellent examples of Federal agencies tapping the expertise and innovation of private sector companies. It will be interesting to see how other projects might take advantage of the technology and services being developed in projects like this. The Large Hadron Collider, for example, is set to go online later this year. I wonder if we will be able to Google that data!

(CeC regularly posts to the TeraGrid Whiteboard.)