An effort at Ames Research Center to standardize NASA websites, dubbed Project Nebula, unexpectedly led to a breakthrough in cloud computing technology. The open source project now known as OpenStack was developed by NASA and Rackspace Inc. Today, the software is managed by the nonprofit OpenStack Foundation and is used by countless businesses and research organizations, including many of the world’s most recognizable brands, to manage their data.
Read more: http://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2012/it_2.html
Image credit: NASA