The National Science Foundation (NSF), Google Incorporated (NASDAQ: GOOG), and the IBM Corporation (NYSE: IBM) have formed a partnership to create the Cluster Exploratory (CluE), an innovative tool designed to help the academic community conduct research projects that would otherwise be too expensive to explore.
CluE is a new distributed computing resource consisting of approximately 1600 processors. The massive capacity of these networked computers will give scientists and engineers from academic institutions across the nation the opportunity to perform the types of data-intensive studies researchers rarely get to conduct because of the prohibitive costs associated with maintaining a large-scale computer infrastructure.
NSF’s Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate will select the research projects that get access to CluE based on proposals submitted by the researchers. Google and IBM will cover all the costs of operating CluE along with providing some necessary support services.
Officials involved with CluE are optimistic it will help accelerate the pace of important scientific research being conducted around the US and they hope the collaboration will pave the way for similar public-private partnerships in the future. As one CISE representative explained,
“We welcome any comparable offers from industry that offer the same potential for transformative research outcomes.”
Jeannette Wing
Assistant Director, NSF CISE
Experts are anticipating the new cluster will support 10 to 15 research projects annually. If you’d like more information about the concept behind CluE, you can visit the Google-IBM Academic Cluster Computer Initiative web site.
Source: National Science Foundation News
Related Links: folding.stanford.edu; boinc.berkeley.edu; waset.org; The New York Times
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Tags: cancer research; supercomputing; genomics; cloud computing; University of Washington
