NSF, Google, IBM in strategic relationship on Internet-scale computing
To bridge the gap between industry and academia, it is important that academic researchers are exposed to the emerging computing paradigm behind the growth of Internet-scale applications
Power in numbers. The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate announced the creation of a strategic relationship with Google and IBM. The Cluster Exploratory (CluE) relationship will allow the academic research community to conduct experiments and test new theories and ideas using a large-scale, massively distributed computing cluster. In an open letter to the academic computing research community, Jeannette Wing, the assistant director at NSF for CISE, said that the relationship will give the academic computer science research community access to resources that would be unavailable to it otherwise.
In October 2007 Google and IBM created a large-scale computer cluster of approximately 1,600 processors to give the academic community access to otherwise prohibitively expensive resources. Fundamental changes in computer architecture and increases in network capacity are encouraging software developers to take new approaches to computer-science problem solving. In order to bridge the gap between industry and academia, it is important that academic researchers are exposed to the emerging computing paradigm behind the growth of Internet-scale applications. This new relationship with NSF will expand access to this research infrastructure to academic institutions across the nation. In an effort to create greater awareness of research opportunities using data-intensive computing, the CISE directorate will solicit proposals from academic researchers. NSF will then select the researchers to have access to the cluster and provide support to the researchers to conduct their work. Google and IBM will cover the costs associated with operating the cluster and will provide other support to the researchers. NSF will not provide any funding to Google or IBM for these activities. The timeline for releasing the formal request for proposals to the academic community is still being developed, but NSF anticipates being able to support ten to fifteen research projects in the first year of the program, and will likely expand the number of projects in the future.
Information about the Google-IBM Academic Cluster Computing Initiative can be found at http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/20071008_ibm_univ.html
