I’m in Doha, Qatar at the moment visiting some family, and found this article particularly relevant. TheRegister post refers to how IBM has stepped up it’s research in Cloud Computing by teaming up with Universities in the US, Qatar and South Africa. The projects fall in various fields and range from Oil and Gas to Medical research… here’s an excerpt:
The three Qatar campuses will be collaborating with IBM to do seismic modeling as part of oil and gas exploration and create integrated production software for the oil and gas industry, according to Big Blue. (What makes this clouds and not just supercomputing and ERP with a process bent is beyond me).
The universities are also working on an Arabic language search engine and will be testing and migrating unspecified Hadoop/MapReduce programming models (from what to what, they didn’t say). The schools will also be creating a curriculum to teach cloud programming techniques. Over time, the schools expect top use the clouds as part of other search, data mining, simulation, computational biology, and financial modeling and forecasting applications.
It’s good to start seeing examples of academic uses of Cloud Computing… clearly IBM is taking a different approach than the Googles, Amazons, and SalesForces of this world.
No Comments on "IBM teaming up with universities for Cloud Computing R&D…"