In 2010, the U.S. Government instituted an aggressive cloud computing migration strategy and there are some pretty amazing things coming from it, according to a recent blog post which highlighted five “exceptional” projects, in terms of both scope and disruptive potential.

1. The CluE Project: This is a partnership between the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the IBM/Google Academic Cloud Computing Initiative (ACCI) to fund Big Data research at institutions across the country like MIT and Yale. Ongoing research includes creating ocean simulations, creating new algorithms for indexing astronomical images and making web search more effective.

2. USA.gov: This web site is the “go-to destination for anything related to the government” and must handle high numbers of traffic related to major events like elections and national disasters. Since moving to the cloud, USA.gov has a reduced upgrade time and shorter downtimes, and it costs 72 percent less than the old site.

3. Project Matsu: Inspired by obstacles in the relief effort after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Project Matsu uses Hadoop to retrieve and timestamp satellite images so that workers can find areas where help is needed most and plan relief efforts.

4. Bionimbus: This is an open-source cloud for scientists studying genomics and enables data management and analysis across data centers, from large labs to single laptops.

5. Cloud First: This project identified how to eliminate billions of dollars of wasted IT expenditures. The plan will close 1,000 data centers by 2015 and migrate 79 services to the cloud.