NOAA and Microsoft Announce Cloud Computing Collaboration to Advance Climate-Ready Nation Mission

Dating back to 1986, ISC is the world's longest running and Europe's foremost HPC conference. In June 2020, ISC held ISC2020 Digital, an online event for the HPC community. This report summarizes a presentation from that digital conference: an update on the EuroEXA project given by Peter Hopton, founder and innovator behind Iceotope and the VeryPC Group, as well as the chair of both the Data Centre Strategy and Future Computing Systems committees at the British Computer Society (the Chartered Institute for IT).

Two weeks ago, the US Department of Defense officially canceled its Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud solicitation and contract, ending a long period of uncertainty and controversy. Originally, the contract, which designated $10 billion to support cloud computing capabilities for a variety of workloads and departments across the DoD, had been awarded to a single vendor, Microsoft Azure, in 2019. However, after appeals from other vendors, the process was reevaluated. Ultimately Microsoft was awarded the contract a second time. After nearly two years into the JEDI solicitation and award process, the DoD stated that their needs had evolved, and the original contract no longer aligned with the requirements of the department. A new solicitation was issued, the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract, which indicated a plan to use multiple vendors to fulfill the needs of the contract. Currently, the DoD is seeking proposals from Microsoft and Amazon Web Services but will likely evaluate other qualified U.S. based CSPs.