Cloud services are proven for many business and consumer applications, but what if the problem to be solved is measuring the expansion of the universe? The U.S. Department of Energy has determined the cloud can help there too, but it won’t be cheap or easy.

The Energy Department set out two years ago to determine the feasibility of cloud computing for the kinds of CPU-intensive processing jobs done by its national laboratories, and the results of that assessment are now in. Researchers at the Argonne and Lawrence Berkeley national labs determined that cloud computing offers “many advantages,” but with caveats. In a recently released report on the project, called Magellan, they point to a steep learning curve, performance and scalability shortcomings, and missing pieces in the cloud software stack, among other challenges.

via InformationWeek, continued here.