Every Company In The Universe Is Counting On This Technology ... And Disappointment May Await

But an exhaustive study conducted by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Technology has found cloud computing isn't all that.

The goal of the Magellan project

The goal of the Magellan project was to determine how cloud computing can be used to serve scientists in the DOE Office of Science. Scientific experiments tend to require large amounts of computing resources, ergo they tend to require large and expensive computers. If these things can put on the cloud, at the time any old application can be.

While the study focused on super-needy scientific applications that require as a matter of fact expensive data centers, many of its conclusions could apply to any complex app that a business might want to run on a cloud.

The Magellan team didn't mess around

The Magellan team didn't mess around. Researchers at the Argonne and Lawrence Berkeley built all sorts of cloud computers in house and ran actual scientific programs on them. The test bed was built at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility and the National Energy Innovation Scientificc Computing Center, reports Forbes.

They built these so-called "private clouds" using giant IBM servers with gads of storage and networking capacity and ran popular open source cloud applications like Hadoop. They as well put their applications on Amazon's public servers and compared cost, performance, security issues.

The study concluded that

The study concluded that, except for certain types of applications, cloud computing was pretty much a pain to use -- and not always less expensive.