Program pushes internet-scale development to students

Google and IBM have teamed up to train students for web-based software development.

The project will provide education and resources to universities that wish to teach courses on software as a service. Such online applications provide access to remotely-hosted software via the web such as Google's search engine, Google Apps or IBM's upcoming hosted services platform.

Students typically don't have access to the massive server grids that run online applications. As a result, the two companies claim, students are graduating without the skills needed to write internet-scale applications.

"It's no longer enough to program one machine well," argued Google senior software engineer Christophe Bisciglia.

"To tackle tomorrow's challenges, students need to be able to program thousands of machines to manage massive amounts of data in the blink of an eye. "

The two companies aim to solve this issue by constructing a pilot program for a new education-only data center. Both IBM and Google will provide the hardware to build a cluster of several hundred computers.

The two companies estimate that once completed, the datacenter will contain more than 1,600 processors. The machines will Linux with the open source Xen virtualization technology, as well as an open source implementation of Google's MapReduce and Google File System, both of which are designed to handle tasks and data that are spread out of a large number of compute nodes.

Students will log into the datacenter remotely to test their cloud computing projects.

The system had been initially tested through the University of Washington. The pilot program will add students and professors from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie-Melon University, the University of Maryland, Stanford University, and the University of California at Berkeley.