National Science Foundation awards millions to 14 universities for cloud computing research

CLuE awards promote academic use of cluster computing resources on IBM/Google cloud

Today, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced it has awarded nearly $5 million in grants to 14 universities through its Cluster Exploratory (CLuE) program to participate in the IBM/Google Cloud Computing University Initiative. The initiative will provide the computing infrastructure for leading-edge research projects that could help us better understand our planet, our bodies, and pursue the limits of the World Wide Web.

In 2007, IBM and Google announced a joint university initiative to help computer science students gain the skills they need to build cloud applications. Now, NSF is using the same infrastructure and open source methods to award CLuE grants to universities around the United States. Through this program, universities will use software and services running on an IBM/Google cloud to explore innovative research ideas in data-intensive computing. These projects cover a range of activities that could lead not only to advances in computing research, but also to significant contributions in science and engineering more broadly.

NSF awarded Cluster Exploratory (CLuE) program grants to Carnegie-Mellon University, Florida International University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Purdue University, University of California-Irvine, University of California-San Diego, University of California-Santa Barbara, University of Maryland, University of Massachusetts, University of Virginia, University of Washington, University of Wisconsin, University of Utah and Yale University.

"Academic researchers have expressed a need for access to massively scaled computing infrastructure to explore radically new approaches to solving data-intensive problems. These approaches would be unthinkable using ordinary computing resources available on campuses today," Jeannette Wing, NSF's assistant director for computer & information science and engineering. "We are pleased to provide the awards to these fourteen universities, enabling researchers to engage with this emerging and novel model of computing."

"IBM is intensely focused on applying technology and science to make the world work better," said Willy Chiu, vice president, IBM Cloud Labs. "IBM is thrilled to power the groundbreaking studies taking place at these prestigious universities, and to help enable researchers and students around the world tackle some of the biggest problems of our time."

"We're pleased and excited that the CluE program will support a wide range of original research," said Alfred Spector, Google's vice president for research and special initiatives. "We're looking forward to seeing the grantees solve challenging problems across various fields through creative applications of distributed computing." The universities will run a wide range of advanced projects and explore innovative research ideas in data-intensive computing, including advancements in image processing, comparative studies of large-scale data analysis, studies and improvements to the Internet, and human genome sequencing, among others, using software and services on the IBM/Google cloud infrastructure.