Today, both Google and IBM announced their intentions to join
hands in a collaboration effort intended to bring mirth and
merriment to computer science students around the world. The new
initiative will be piloted at a few Universities in the U.S.,
and is aimed at better educating students in how to develop, on
a long term scale, large-scale distributed software. With the
advent of multi-core processors being in more desktops than ever
and even low-cost servers having dozens of CPUs available to
them, it makes sense that new generations of programmers will
need exceptional parallel programming skills. To show their
devotion to such an endeavor, IBM and Google are sponsoring a
massive cluster of computers, including both Google servers and
IBM BladeCenter / System x servers. The cluster will be
reachable over the Internet , and will rely on Linux along with
XEN virtualization. They are also backing it with their own set
of open-source software tools and assisting in the management of
the projects it spawns. So