IBM, Google team for university research

By Colleen Taylor, Contributing Editor -- Electronic News, 10/8/2007

Bringing together two tech industry giants known as old school and new school pioneers, respectively, IBM Corp. and Google Inc. today announced plans to team up on an initiative to promote new software development methods at universities. As part of the program, the two companies will provide hardware, software and services to add to universities' curricula and research.

According to the companies, the goal of the initiative is "to improve computer science students' knowledge of highly parallel computing practices to better address the emerging paradigm of large-scale distributed computing." With their combined resources, the companies said they hope to lower the "financial and logistical barriers" for the academic community to work on Internet-scale projects.

Financial details of the companies' participation in the initiative have not been disclosed.

The University of Washington was the first to join the initiative. A small number of universities will also pilot the program, including Carnegie-Mellon University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Maryland. In the future, IBM and Google said, the program will be expanded to include additional researchers, educators and scientists. For the project, the two companies have dedicated a large cluster of several hundred computers-- a combination of Google machines and IBM BladeCenter and System x servers-- that is planned to grow to more than 1,600 processors. Students will access the cluster via the Internet to test their parallel programming course projects. The servers will run open source software.

"Google is excited to partner with IBM to provide resources which will better equip students and researchers to address today's developing computational challenges," Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, said in a statement.

"This project combines IBM's historic strengths in scientific, business and secure-transaction computing with Google's complementary expertise in Web computing and massively scaled clusters," Samuel J. Palmisano, IBM's chairman, president and CEO, added in a statement. "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."

This is not the only program IBM has worked on in recent months aimed at university students. In August, the company announced plans to create a Multicore Computing Center (MC2) at the University of Maryland in Baltimore to focus on supercomputing research related to aerospace/defense, financial services, medical imaging and weather/climate change prediction.