This past week it was announced that the IBM/Google cloud computing initiative is giving 14 universities almost $5 million in grants to pick up cloud computing projects. The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded the grant money.
Award Winners
- Carnegie-Mellon University
- Flordia International Unviersity
- MIT
- Purdue
- University of California-Irvine
- UC-San Diego
- UC-Santa Barbara
- University of Maryland
- University of Massachusetts
- University of Virginia
- University of Washington
- University of Wisconsin
- University of Utah
- Yale
Although these universities will run a range of projects what is most interesting is academia’s excitement and embracement of this rapidly developing and exciting technology.
“Academic researchers have expressed a need for access to massively scaled computing infrastructures that allow them to complete projects and research activities that have been difficult or impossible previously due to the amount of data involved” Jeannette Wing, NSF’s assistant director for computer and information science and engineering
These projects demonstrate the computational power and distributed resource capacity that cloud computing can allow, but by no means should this be limited to research projects. Tapping into this powerful resource from a marketing and distribution channel perspective provides just as much flexibility and accessibility.
The important takeaway is that the embracement of this technology and relationships being built with these leading technology companies, IBM & Google, simply display more reasons to explore more of this technology and the services that it can provide. Those services could be streaming video, interactive multimedia map elements or any number of other advancements. The point being academia is ready for these new technologies and finding ways to embrace and utilizing them for the computation power or the cost saving and decreased administrative efforts.
So what do you think? Are more institutes ready to embrace cloud computing?