Will We Finally Get a Global, Query-able Scientific Cloud?

" ... Two recent developments suggest we might be a lot closer to a much more powerful computational science world. On February 22, 2013, the White House responded to a petition on the 'We the people platform' which had amassed the required volume of signatures. The petition urged the US government to, 'Require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research.' Noticing a trend in global policies and the social and economic benefits of open government data, the response went one step further, 'The Obama Administration agrees that citizens deserve easy access to the results of research their tax dollars have paid for … In addition to addressing the issue of public access to scientific publications, the memorandum requires that agencies start to address the need to improve upon the management and sharing of scientific data produced with Federal funding.' This fundamental shift has the potential to transform the efficiency of US research, particularly drug discovery and effectiveness. Now, the funding agencies have begun to act and, even more significantly, the biggest funding bodies will be announcing their changes in October 2015. Also, as China continues to publish more research of increasing quality, will this move from Obama’s government prove to be decisively forward-thinking in keeping the U.S. at the cutting edge of research, reaping the educational and financial benefits that go with it? The second development relates to what to do with all of this data. Could these government pushes, particularly in the Western world, build a global queryable scientific cloud? Supercomputers are at the heart of a huge number of important scientific and defense research projects. Obama recently signed an executive order authorizing the creation of new supercomputing research initiative called the National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI). Its goal is to pave the way for the first exaflop supercomputer — something that’s about 30 times faster than today’s fastest machines. Openly-available academic data on the Web will soon become the norm. Funders and publishers are already making preparations for how this content will be best managed. With the coming open data mandates meaning that we are now talking about ‘when’ not ‘if,’ the majority of academic outputs live somewhere on the Web, the big question then becomes, ‘what’s next?’ ..."