ast week the National Science Foundation’s Computer and Information Science and Engineering directorate announced the creation of a strategic relationship with Google Inc. and IBM.
The Cluster Exploratory (CluE) relationship will enable the academic research community to conduct experiments and test new theories and ideas using a large-scale, massively distributed computing cluster.
“Access to the Google-IBM academic cluster via the CluE program will provide the academic community with the opportunity to do research in data-intensive computing and to explore powerful new applications,” said Jeannette Wing, assistant director at NSF for CISE. “It can also serve as a tool for educating the next generation of scientists and engineers.”
“Google is proud to partner with the National Science Foundation to provide computing resources to the academic research community,” said Stuart Feldman, vice president of engineering at Google Inc. “It is our hope that research conducted using this cluster will allow researchers across many fields to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by large-scale, distributed computing.”
“Extending the Google/IBM academic program with the National Science Foundation should accelerate research on Internet-scale computing and drive innovation to fuel the applications of the future,” said Willy Chiu, vice president of IBM Software Strategy and High Performance On Demand Solutions. “IBM is pleased to be collaborating with the NSF on this project.”
Google and IBM created the cluster of approximately 1600 processors in October of last year to give the academic community access to otherwise prohibitively expensive resources.
While the timeline for releasing the formal request for proposals to the academic community is still being developed, NSF anticipates being able to support 10 to 15 research projects in the first year of the program, and will likely expand the number of projects in the future.
