Google and IBM team up on clusters

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Google and IBM have announced a new initiative to ensure software developer students can address the challenges of future internet-scale applications.

In order to reduce costs and improve resources for academic research into parallel computing, the two IT giants are collaborating to make a new dedicated internet-based computing cluster available to students.

The cluster already contains several hundred dedicated IBM BladeCentre and System X servers running on the open source Linux operating system, Xen virtualisation systems and Apache's Hadoop project, which is an open source implementation of Google's MapReduce and File System components, with plans to extend this environment to more than 1,600 processors. Students will access the cluster via the internet to test their parallel programming course projects.

The two companies have also created a number of resources to support the initiative, including a Creative Commons licensed university curriculum developed by Google and the University of Washington focusing on parallel computing techniques; IBM designed open source software plug-in for clusters running Hadoop that works with open source development platform Eclipse, for which a plug-in is currently available; access to IBM Tivoli systems management software for the management, monitoring and dynamic resource provisioning of the cluster; and a website to encourage collaboration among universities in the program built on web 2.0 technologies from IBM's Innovation Factory.

Although neither company has said how much the initiative is costing, reports estimate the investment is in the region of $20-25 million (£9.8-12.3 million) each.

In addition to the University of Washington - the first institution to join the program - a number of other US institutions have joined Google and IBM in their mission including Carnegie-Mellon University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Maryland. The vendors said additional researchers, educators and scientists will join the initiative in future.

Students at the University of Washington have already been able to produce complicated programmes using the resources, such as software that scans Wikipedia edits to identify spam and organises global news articles by geographic location.

Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said: "It is imperative that students are adequately equipped to harness the potential of modern computing systems and for researchers to be able to innovate ways to address emerging problems."

Samuel Palmisano, chairman, president and chief executive at IBM, added: "We're aiming to train tomorrow's programmers to write software that can support a tidal wave of global web growth and trillions of secure transactions every day."

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