IBM and Google Fund University Programs

IBM and Google announced that they're starting a university program designed to promote programming practices for cloud computing, the practice of throwing many computers at a problem in parallel.

The companies are each contributing $20 to $25 million in systems, software and services to six universities who will support research in this area. The six universities are led by the University of Washington in Seattle (ironically, in Microsoft's own backyard), where preliminary research has been done, and include Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Stanford, Cal-Berkeley and the University of Maryland.

Programming tools and techniques do seem to lag behind advances in hardware. In particular, few, if any, mainstream developers write code to take advantage of multi-core systems. Do we need to expand programming skills to take advantage of new processor technologies and architectures? Tell me at [email protected].

Posted by Peter Varhol on October 09, 2007


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