Google’s play for the cloud – What is in it for scientists?

You can read all about it on techmeme, or better still, just read Brady’s post. Yes, Google is making its cloud available to you. AppEngine (do like the name) is an integrated application environment, that in a way does for developers what blogspot did for bloggers some years ago. You get to host your apps at an appspot.com domain or from a Google Apps domain. Google provides the entire stack; you can get started very quickly, most notably getting access to arguably the best distributed file and storage system in the world. But like Blogspot, there are limitations

First of all at this point you are limited to Python, at least for now. Nothing wrong with that, but not everyone is a Python developer, although all the Python/Django folks out there must be salivating. Perhaps most of all, this is a tightly coupled environment. One of the things I like about Amazon’s offering is the loose coupling and ability to package together an environment of your choice and push it onto the Amazon cloud. Therein lies the limitation with the Google engine. Scientific computing requires more flexibility than Google provides right now. I don’t see how one could implement MPI, etc on this infrastructure, and use it as a compute engine as such, something EC2 can be used for. On the other hand if you are developing data driven apps and want to leverage GFS/BigTable, and don’t mind doing things the “Google way” go for it. I can see a number of good uses, esp on the web app side.

More on this later. Just thought I’d add to the echo chamber. My current takeway. AppEngine seems to be well thought out and designed. If you are a Python web developer, you are probably very happy. The ability to leverage Big Table/GFS is huge. Just remember that you are locked into a proprietary environment, albeit a really good one. In the end, I was left a little underwhelmed, especially as someone with an interest in scientific computing. As a huge Google fan, especially when it comes to computing, my expectations were higher. Personally, I prefer the flexibility and HPC capabilities of AWS, and the ecosystem that it has spawned due to it’s flexibility and generalized architecture, but if you are a web app developer and this includes bioinformaticians/cheminformaticians, give AppEngine a look, you might find it useful.

Further reading:
Google Blog
App Engine blog
Neil

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