IBM Google Academic Cloud Computing Initiative

IBM/Google Academic Cloud Computing Initiative (ACCI)

The IBM/Google Academic Cloud Computing Initiative (ACCI) is a joint university initiative to help computer science students gain the skills they need to build cloud infrastructures and applications.

The IBM/Google initiative aims to provide computer science students with a complete suite of open source based development tools so they can gain the advanced programming skills necessary to innovate and address the challenges of the Cloud Computing model - which uses many computers networked together through open standards - and thereby drive the Internet's next phase of growth.

The companies will provide hardware, software and services to augment university curricula and expand research horizons while lowering the financial and logistical barriers for the academic community to explore Internet-scale computing.

The following resources are available from IBM and Google to Universities to leverage for their respective projects:

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
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.
Management, monitoring and dynamic resource provisioning by IBM using IBM Tivoli systems management software

Using this virtual IT lab, students will learn how to develop systems and write massively parallel applications that take full advantage of the distributed computing paradigm rather than the conventional one-server, one-application model.

Google and IBM's first pilot phase of the ACCI, granted several prominent US universities access to this large infrastructure. The University of Washington was the first to join the initiative, and a short list of other universities were added to pilot the program.

In 2008 the ACCI partnered with the National Science Foundation to provide grant funding to academic researchers interested in exploring large-data applications that could take advantage of this infrastructure. This resulted in the creation of the Cluster Exploratory (CLuE) program led by Dr Jim French, which currently funds 14 University projects.

The first round of CluE grants were awarded to the following universities, utilizing the IBM/Google cluster:

Carnegie-Mellon University
Florida International University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
University of Wisconsin - Madison
Yale University
Purdue University
University of California - Irvine
University of California - San Diego / San Diego Supercomputer Center
University of California - Santa Barbara
University of Maryland - College Park - Cloud Computing Center
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
University of Virginia
University of Washington
University of Utah

Contributions

Video: IBM/Google Academic Cloud Computing Initiative (ACCI)
Article: National Science Foundation Awards Millions to Fourteen Universities for Cloud Computing Research - August 2009
CluE awards promote academic use of cluster computing resources on IBM/Google cloud.
Video: Research and Education in the Clouds: Experience at the University - May 2009
In this talk Jimmy Lin, Associate Professor in the iSchool at the University of Maryland, presents Cloud Computing activities at the University of Maryland, in collaboration with Google/IBM under the Academic Cloud Computing Initiative and in partnership with Amazon Web Services. Efforts include semester-long Hadoop courses, as well as research projects in text processing and bio-informatics. He focuses on his attempts to integrate research with education, to the benefit of both.