* Astronomy

'Cloud computing' is being pitched as a new nirvana for scientists drowning in data. But can it deliver?
Dennis Gannon, a computer scientist at Indiana University in Bloomington, knows all about bringing huge amounts of computer power to bear on complex scientific problems. He has at his disposal, for the purpose, Big Red, one of the world's largest supercomputers, right there on the campus.
But when Jong Youl Choi, a graduate student computer scientist at the university, approached him with a bioinformatics program that he had written, Gannon suggested they run it on Amazon's EC2 Beta program, as translating it for Big Red would be too time-consuming. Last year, the Seattle-based e-commerce firm introduced a 'cloud-computing' option that provides access to an ever-expandable 'cloud' of powerful computer servers. Gannon and Choi set up three virtual computers and uploaded their program, which seeks matches for an unknown protein sequence from a massive national database. The job took about 15 minutes and cost them less than US$2.00.

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