Google and IBM have teamed up to provide data centers to help students and researchers write software for large-scale applications. This is a large push for colleges to emphasize the needs of parallel computing; it is a relatively new field not taught traditionally at the undergrad level. In addition, the number of computer science majors have been on the decline and “industry executives and computer scientists say a shortage of skills and talent could limit future growth.”

Randal E. Bryant, dean of the computer science school at Carnegie Mellon University, states that “We in academia and the government labs have not kept up with the times. Universities really need to get on board.” From my personal experience, I’d have to admit that university labs, at least for undergraduates, do not have cutting-edge technology.

Six universities will be involved in the initiative. They are Carnegie Mellon, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Maryland and the University of Washington.

I am really excited by this initiative. On the other hand, I already feel behind the times as the upcoming classes will have more knowledge about parallel computing over large-scale data sets. This is a good reminder of how quick technology is moving.

Details here:

To simplify the development of massively parallel programs Google and IBM have created the following resources:

- A cluster of processors running an open source implementation of Google’s published computing infrastructure (MapReduce and GFS from Apache’s Hadoop project)
- A Creative Commons licensed university curriculum developed by Google and the University of Washington focusing on massively parallel computing techniques available at: http://code.google.com/edu/content/parallel.html
- Open source software designed by IBM to help students develop programs for clusters running Hadoop. The software works with Eclipse, an open source development platform. The plugin is currently available at: http://lucene.apache.org/hadoop/
- Management, monitoring and dynamic resource provisioning of the cluster by IBM using IBM Tivoli systems management software
- A website to encourage collaboration among universities in the program. This will be built on Web 2.0 technologies from IBM’s Innovation Factory.

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