Google, IBM and cloud computing research

Google and IBM recently announced setup of a data center for access to students to work on cloud computing. They expect to setup 1,600 processors by the end of the year. This should be a fantastic resource for students to build and run some large applications.

Google has published a bunch of research that has gone into building their applications. In particular, MapReduce - a programming model based on functional programming - allows programs to be automatically parrallelized. According to Google, "a typical MapReduce computation processes many terabytes of data on thousands of machines."