Google and I.B.M. Join in 'Cloud Computing' Research
Even the nation's elite universities do not provide the technical training needed for the kind of powerful and highly complex computing Google is famous for, say computer scientists. So Google and I.B.M. are announcing today …
Context & Ripple Effects
The announcement lands at a moment when Google's scale has become its defining fact: on October 8, 2007 its shares close above $600 for the first time, valuing the company near $188 billion — more than Wal-Mart on paper — while reports circulate, unconfirmed, that engineers have spent over two years in secret on a mobile phone. Against that backdrop, Google and I.B.M. are funding what elite universities concede they cannot provide themselves: hands-on training in the large-cluster computing behind Google's own systems.
The Wall Street Journal picks the story up the same day, which matters because neither company has a product to sell here — the deliverable is curriculum, cluster access, and a talent pipeline, with the still-loose term 'cloud computing' attached to both brands at once.
First-order effects
- Students at the partner universities gain direct access to Google- and I.B.M.-scale clusters for coursework in parallel and distributed programming — training their own institutions have admitted they cannot provision.
- I.B.M. attaches its name to 'cloud computing' alongside the company that operates it at scale, buying definitional credibility in a category where it has no equivalent production footprint.
Second-order effects
- Rival hardware and software vendors face pressure to fund comparable campus programs or cede a graduating class already trained on one vendor pair's stack and tooling.
- University computer-science departments begin depending on corporate-donated infrastructure, pulling curricular choices toward the architectures the donors run commercially.
Third-order effects
- If vendor-funded campus compute becomes the norm, universities shift from owning research infrastructure to brokering access to industry clouds, and 'cloud computing' hardens from marketing phrase into a defined academic discipline.
- A cohort trained on hyperscale distributed systems flows straight into the labor market for data-center-scale services, compounding the advantage of the operators who wrote the syllabus.
The trend: Compute is migrating from institutional ownership to vendor-lent access, with cloud operators seeding university curricula to shape both the future talent pool and how the technology itself gets defined.