GoogleandIBMhave announced an initiative to
promote new software development methods that will help students
and researchers to more easily produce internet-scale
applications.
IBM and Google are teaming up to provide hardware, software and
services to augment university curricula and expand research into
distributed computing solutions, including parallel
programming.
With their combined resources, the companies are hoping to lower
the financial and logistical barriers for the academic community to
explore the distributed internet application model.
The University of Washington is the first to join the
initiative. A small number of universities will also pilot the
programme, including Carnegie-Mellon University, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of
California at Berkeley and the University of Maryland.
In the future, said IBM and Google, the programme will be
expanded to include additional researchers, colleges and
scientists.
Fundamental changes in computer architecture and increases in
network capacity are encouraging software developers to take new
approaches to computer-science problem solving, said the pair.
For web software such as search, social networking and mobile
commerce to run quickly, computational tasks often need to be
broken into hundreds or thousands of smaller pieces to run across
many servers simultaneously.
Parallel programming techniques are also used for complex
scientific analysis such as gene sequencing and climate
modelling.
IBM CEO Samuel Palmisano said, "We are 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."
For the project, the two companies have dedicated a large
cluster of several hundred computers. Students will access the
cluster via the internet to test their parallel programming course
projects.