Late yesterday, it was reported at NetworkWorld that the US Department of Energy is looking to explore cloud computing initiatives on their own (and independent of the NASA initiatives) to the tune of $32 million. The initiative is being paid for by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (or the Stimulus Bill, to you and me).

This, to me, seems to be the sort of thing that the newly appointed US CIO Vivek Kundra would be playing traffic cop on, but it appears to have been organized completely independent of the infrastructure chief’s knowledge or direction.  All announcements and quotes seemed to have come directly from the DOE on the story.

It’s being reported the money is being used to build out infrastructure directly, but if you search for the buried lede in the press release, you see that the money is being split evenly between Argonne National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to not just build infrastructure, but research public cloud offerings from “Amazon, Microsoft and Google” for suitability of use.

As Nate said, following the NASA / Apps.gov announcement: “The government effort is definitely something to keep an eye on not only from a cloud computing perspective but overall technology policy as this will drastically change the landscape of how a large section of the government utilizes and implements software.”