National Science Foundation Joins Forces with Google and IBM to Give Universities Internet Scale Capability

As the uses of the Internet grow and the need for storage and processing capacity expands dramatically, some of the largest players in the information marketplace are looking ahead to the implications of continued exponential growth. The National Science Foundation (NSF), a US Government agency, recently awarded US $5m to 14 US universities to participate in an initiative called the Google/IBM Cloud Computing University Initiative. As part of the initiative, Google and IBM have invested US $30m to build a network of multiple data centres, each consisting of several hundred computers, and to train university students and researchers to develop applications on that infrastructure. The NSF award is intended to expand the scope of the initiative to include more universities, enabling leading-edge scientific research projects that require the capability to use multiple petabytes of data, known as Internet Scale Capability. Some current examples of Internet Scale Capability include Facebook’s use of 1.5 petabytes to store its users’ 10 billion photos, and Google’s processing of approximately 20 petabytes of data every day through its search engine. (As defined by wikipedia, a petabyte is a unit of information or computer storage equal to one quadrillion bytes (10 to the 14th power), or one million gigabytes). According to the planners behind the initiative, the challenge is a human relations one, as much as it is a technological one. If students have used only small-scale systems in their studies, they may be unprepared to think in terms of possible applications and solutions in a broader context, as they would be if they had had early access to meta-data, meta-scale problems and the hardware and software to match. The recipients of the NSF award propose to use the Internet Scale Capability to do such things as: disseminate DNA sequences from genetic material, monitor chemical reactions taking place in living cells, analyze aerial images to support disaster migration and environmental protection, and analyze astronomical images to track the evolution of galaxies. For a news article on the initiative, see: http://tinyurl.com/yhluj2u For a link to the NSF press release, visit: http://tinyurl.com/yl3uoct Summary by: Darren Hall