Since 2004, two robotic space rovers — Spirit and Opportunity — have been exploring the surface of Mars, collecting information on rocks and soils that hold clues about past water activity on the planet.

Spirit has been silent since March 2010 and is believed to be in “lower-power hibernation mode” for the Martian winter. Opportunity, however, is still hard at work, its daily tasks conveyed to it by a team of engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

In November 2010, that project team announced it is to be the first NASA space mission to use cloud computing for its daily work. It’s all part of JPL CIO Jim Rinaldi’s vision of a brave new world where the complex software and data that the space scientists require can be delivered by a vast pool of rented computing capacity, available on demand.

“My job is all about preparing for the future; about seeing what’s coming down the line and balancing the needs of the Laboratory with the funds available,” says Rinaldi. That focus on cost is essential: JPL is a federally funded facility – with around 5,000 sophisticated users, all with demanding requirements – run by the California Institute of Technology on behalf of NASA.

In the case of the Mars Rover Exploration Project, cloud computing makes a lot of sense, since what started as a three-month mission back in 2004 has now been kept running for six years by “bonus” add-on projects.

With the volume of data generated outgrowing the systems originally implemented to host it, the virtually limitless capacity of the cloud, and the cost efficiencies it promises, have become irresistible to JPL.

It’s a bold use of cloud computing, and the team at JPL has collaborated closely with the cloud team at Amazon to migrate the rover project’s activity-planning software, Maestro, to Amazon’s cloud platform.

Unique opportunities

But exploring new worlds is nothing new for Rinaldi. In fact, it’s been a recurring theme throughout his career. “I’ve never worked in the same industry twice,” he says.

When he arrived at JPL in 2005, he’d already worked for a chemicals company, a computer networking supplier, a hotel chain, and two of the largest US government agencies: the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

“I like to think I’ve got as much as I possibly could out of every opportunity I’ve been offered and then thought to myself, ‘What do I want to explore next?’,” he says.

JPL, however, offers opportunities and challenges that he believes he wouldn’t find in any other organization in the world. “What I do here is so entirely unique and, although JPL is quite small compared to other organizations I’ve worked for, that was the real draw for me when I joined in 2005,” he says.

“How many other CIOs support end-users who are looking for life on other planets and putting robots on Mars? It’s a wonderful, exciting place to be a part of.”

On a day-to-day level, Rinaldi has direct management responsibility over JPL’s Institutional Computing and Information Services Office and works closely with information technology management, supporting engineers and space scientists as well as employees in the organization’s finance and business operations.

That, he says, can mean anything from the routine (ensuring the Laboratory’s email and voice-over-IP systems are running well, for example) to the highly complex (such as designing storage infrastructures for images captured in deep space).

Robots on Mars

Multimedia technology also demands a significant amount of his attention. JPL is pioneering in its use of video, for example, to receive, store and share information, and early on in his time at the organization, Rinaldi was involved in the development of JPL-TV, a YouTube-like service for JPL staff who want to share videos relating to their research with colleagues. At the same time, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has its own channel on YouTube itself, which allows it to share regular updates on its work with the wider public.

But hammering out the requirements of engineers and scientists working on groundbreaking research is what Rinaldi really relishes about his role. “My team doesn’t write the code that powers robots on Mars, but we provide all the infrastructure that the people who do write such sophisticated software programs need,” he says.

Every new mission has its own set of complex requirements. Most of them, for example, have sophisticated project lifecycle management (PLM) needs that simply can’t be delivered with the kind of out-of-the-box PLM applications available on the open market. As a result, customized code often needs to be written in-house.

“I work with really smart people and that’s always stimulating,” he says. “But one thing I’ve observed is that most people — even the really smart ones — don’t always know how to ask for the IT they require. So in many ways, I see my role as a translator and, luckily, it’s a task I really enjoy.”

First love

Prior to JPL, Rinaldi was CIO at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in Washington, DC, where he was no less instrumental in groundbreaking projects. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, for example, the agency was mandated by the Bioterrorism Act 2002 to develop new protections for the nation’s food and drug supplies.

That meant developing a user-friendly electronic registration system that enabled food manufacturers and processors, packers and storage operations in the US and overseas to register their facilities and notify the agency quickly in the event of any deliberate or accidental food contamination.

Rinaldi also oversaw an ambitious implementation of new workflow technology, integrating multiple legacy systems to give scientists faster and more reliable access to the clinical trial data and other information they needed in the lengthy drug-approval process.

“What I really liked about the FDA was the pedigree of people it employed,” he says. “They were, in many cases, working there for really noble reasons and I was proud to be supporting them.”

Rinaldi has always been fascinated by science and, at an early age, computing became his first love. A native of Alabama, he graduated in computer science from the University of North Florida in 1977 and went on to work at SCM Organic Chemicals.

“It was intriguing for someone straight out of school to be helping scientists get answers to complex projects,” he recalls. “I quickly developed a fascination with using Fortran for scientific programming and found it a lot of fun. Using Cobol for business programming just wasn’t for me.”

That said, the 16 years he spent in more commercial roles at the Marriott International hotel group were extremely useful in terms of the wide scope of experience they gave him.

There, he worked on projects ranging from the design, build and management of a new data center, to the creation of business intelligence systems for the deep analysis of customer data. He was also directly involved in developing Marriott’s ecommerce strategy, at a time when other major hotel chains had barely dipped a toe into the water of online reservations.

Cloud convert

Today, while other organizations worldwide are still wavering over the pros and cons of cloud computing, JPL is forging ahead.

In support of the federal Open Government Initiative, designed to increase public access to data collected by the US government, JPL collaborated with the cloud team at Microsoft to launch the Be a Martian website in 2009. This crowdsourcing initiative enables the public to become “citizen scientists” and analyze data generated by Mars research work. To date, more than 54,000 people have signed up to become “Martians.”

And JPL has also worked with Google on a cloud-based project involving computer scientists at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) to develop an educational application for elementary school pupils where they can tag labels onto images from the Mars spacecraft. The extended missions of Spirit and Opportunity have provided a valuable resource for testing out cloud computing’s potential for future missions.

Looking forward, the Laboratory is currently building and testing NASA’s next Mars rover, Curiosity, which is scheduled to land on the red planet in August 2012. The data it needs will inevitably use cloud computing resources, while the rover will receive a diet of software uploads designed to execute tasks autonomously.

Driven by Rinaldi’s passion for exploring new horizons, it seems that JPL’s mission to embrace the cloud IT model is only just beginning.

Jim Rinaldi: The Résumé

1977–82
Systems programmer
SCM Organic Chemicals (Chemicals industry)

1982–85
Manager of systems programming
Paradyne (Computer networking)

1985–2001
SVP operations & services
Marriott International (Hospitality industry)

2001–02
Chief of IT services
US Internal Revenue Service (Government agency)

2002–05
CIO
US Food and Drug Administration (Government agency)

2005–present
CIO
Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Aviation & aerospace)