Last Monday, Google and IBM publicly announced plans to take “cloud computing” to a higher level. The two computer industry titans will provide distributed computing resources to Stanford and five other schools as part of a pilot program.

“Cloud computing” is a model by which computer processing is split up over two or more computers over the Internet. Computer processing power can be distributed over many different computers, all over the world.

“For this project, several hundred processors have been allocated in data centers which students and professors can access via the Internet,” Andrew Pederson, a spokesperson for Google’s Corporate Communications division, told The Daily.

With the initiative, IBM and Google have partnered on a “scale never seen before,” said Dennis Quan, the project’s chief architect at IBM and a specialist in high performance computing solutions.

“This project combines IBM’s historic strengths in scientific, business and secure-transaction computing with Google’s complementary expertise in massive, highly parallel computing,” Pederson said.

“It is a very strategic relationship on all mindsets from the very highest level, to advance the field of distributed computing,” Quan added.

The two companies have set up a number of data centers with servers in the IBM and Google headquarters, as well as at the University of Washington, the first school to join the initiative. These data centers will do all the computer processing in a “virtual lab” and then send the results back to students and faculty at participating universities, Quan explained.

In addition to Stanford and the University of Washington, Carnegie Mellon University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, UC-Berkeley and the University of Maryland have also signed on to the pilot program.

Consulting computer science faculty member Sepandar Kamvar, also the technical lead of personalization at Google, told The Daily he will use the new platform in his data mining class.

“I plan to make extensive use of it as part of the course,” he said in an email. “The student projects will be done on the data center computers.”

He added that he was interested in using the data centers to teach “very large-scale data mining, looking for trends in hundreds of millions to billions of data items.”

Both Google and IBM hold the view that an active connection with the academic world is mutually beneficial for corporations and academia. By training future engineers, companies can ensure that the next generation of their employees is adequately trained and prepared for their jobs.

“IBM has a long standing commitment to having a relationship with academia,” Quan explained. “This serves our best interests as well as society in general because it ensures that the next generation of engineers will be well prepared in the area of Web 2.0 computing skill set, an area where they currently lack the skills needed.”

“Google owes a lot to the academic community,” Pederson said, “and in order to close the technological gap between industry and academia, professors and students need to be exposed to this emerging paradigm of massive, highly parallel computing.”

Even though the data centers are located off site, there are no security or privacy issues at stake.

“There are no plans to put sensitive Stanford information on this remote cluster,” William Dally, chair of the computer science department, wrote in an email to The Daily.

At the moment, Stanford is not making the data clusters an integral part of the courses offered, and only Kamvar’s course plans to use it. But that could change.

“If this is successful, other courses may make use of the cluster,” Dally said. “However, it will most likely be used as a tool, not as a major focus for a course.”