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A pilot course taught at the University of Washington has been expanded into a national program that shows students how to program using tens, hundreds or thousands of computers. Google and IBM announced an initiative Monday to promote new programming methods that will help students and researchers address the challenges of Internet-scale applications.

“This is a new style of computing in which the focus is on analyzing massive amounts of data, using massive numbers of computers,” said Ed Lazowska, a UW computer science and engineering professor. “This has come on the scene fairly recently. Universities haven’t been teaching it in part because the software is really complex, and in part because you need a big rack of computers to support it.”

Based on the success of last year’s pilot course at the University of Washington, Google and IBM decided to donate and maintain hundreds of processors that students across the country can use for courses to address large-scale computing on the Web. University partners include the University of Washington, Carnegie Mellon University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Maryland. In future the academic consortium will be expanded to include additional researchers, educators and scientists.

For this project, Google and IBM have dedicated a large cluster of several hundred computers (a combination of Google machines and IBM BladeCenter and System x servers) that is planned to grow to more than 1,600 processors. Students will access the cluster via the Internet to test their parallel programming course projects. The servers will run open source software including the Linux operating system, XEN systems virtualization and Apache’s Hadoop project, an open source implementation of Google’s published computing infrastructure, specifically MapReduce and the Google File System (GFS).

For more details see the Google/IBM joint press release and Universities Combine ‘Cloud’ Forces (The Wall Street Journal).