These cloud experiments are in the early stages, but Ganger expects them to become more important as time goes on. "Eventually, [becoming part of the larger, public cloud] is going to be the right answer," he says. "Eventually cloud computing is going to be something that is understood well enough that the interfaces are standardized, and people agree it's the right way to do it, and it handles all the different modes of computation you want to handle."

As the public cloud matures, researchers across the country may have access to machines in the DCO, and Carnegie Mellon researchers will increase utilization of external data center resources. But Ganger says the software layer that assigns resources will have to become more sophisticated, with the ability to dynamically provision compute and storage capacity to each user without overburdening any specific data center that's attached to the cloud.

"Two years from now, I would like to be at the point where that kind of resource flexibility is there," he says, "but right now it's not, right now we're just spinning the thing up."