Google and IBM on Monday announced an initiative to advance large-scale distributed computing by providing hardware, software, and services to universities.The two companies aim to reduce the cost of distributed computing research, thereby enabling academic institutions and their students to more easily contribute to this emerging computing paradigm. The first university to join the initiative is the University of Washington, located not far from Microsoft’s corporate headquarters in Redmond, Wash. Carnegie-Mellon University, MIT, Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Maryland are also participating in the program. Large-scale distributed computing, also known as cloud computing, has been touted as the future for years now. In a July 2003 paper, Microsoft researcher Jim Gray — who was reported missing at sea earlier this year — noted that IBM and Microsoft were pushing Internet-scale distributed computing as a new model.

The first university to join the initiative is the University of Washington, located not far from Microsoft’s corporate headquarters in Redmond, Wash. Carnegie-Mellon University, MIT, Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Maryland are also participating in the program. As part of the initiative, Google and IBM are providing a cluster of several hundred computers — Google’s custom servers and IBM BladeCenter and System x servers. Over time, the companies expect the cluster to surpass 1,600 processors. The Linux-based servers will run open source software including Xen’s virtualization system and Hadoop, an open source implementation of Google’s distributed file system that’s managed by the Apache Software Foundation. It’s all nice, but where’s this small homy internet-oriented company? I don’t see it anymore…

Source: Infoweek, TGD

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