Google and IBM are working together to build a better cloud  . The two technology giants announced a program to work with U.S. universities to deploy a "cloud" of remote-computing facilities at several locations. Google and IBM each will kick in $20 million to $25 million to build the data centers. The program will start with 400 servers but the companies plan to expand it to 4,000 machines.
The program is being led by the University of Washington in Seattle, which developed many of the cloud-computing techniques. The other schools in the pilot program are Carnegie Mellon University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, University of California at Berkeley, and University of Maryland.
IBM CEO Sam Palmisano said he and Google CEO Eric Schmidt hatched the idea for the collaboration when they were discussing cloud computing at a meeting last December. He said the two shared similar ideas about cloud computing and concerns that today's computer science students don't have the opportunity to program on parallel systems.
Training Tomorrow's Programmers
Google's participation is directly related to its long-term business interests, Schmidt said. "In order to most effectively serve the long-term interests of our users, it is imperative that students are adequately equipped to harness the potential of modern computing systems and for researchers to be able to innovate ways to address emerging problems," he said.
The project combines "IBM's historic strengths in scientific, business, and secure -transaction computing with Google's complementary expertise in Web computing and massively scaled clusters," Palmisano said in a statement. "We're 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 pilot phase, the project will feature a combination of Google's machines and IBM BladeCenter and System x servers. The servers will run Linux , XEN virtualization , and Apache's Hadoop project, an open-source implementation of Google's published computing infrastructure .
Young Hotshots and 'Old Fat Guys'
Despite IBM's reputation as a mainframe vendor, it is in fact "the logical leader in cloud computing" given its expertise in data-center management, Schmidt said. Palmisano joked that between Google's young engineers and IBM's "old fat guys," the firms have an opportunity to "create something significant." The joke has some significance in light of an age-discrimination suit against Google filed by former director of engineering Brian Reid, 54, who claims he was fired because his age made him a bad "cultural fit." (continued...)
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