Google and IBM have taken the lead to develop distributed computing skills in collaboration with six universities. With the rapid growth in software services and exponential increase in massive data warehouses, the industry needs more people with distributed computing skills.
Google and the University of Washington will develop the curriculum. Participating academic institutions in this effort are Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Stanford, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Maryland, and the University of Washington.
Google and IBM are contributing resources including software to teach the coding, managing, monitoring, and provisioning of software written using parallel computing techniques. These include a computing cluster running Apache's Hadoop project.
Parallel computing techniques, which were traditionally confined to supercomputers, are now required to manage distributed computing systems. Sequential programming is not suitable for today’s distributed software. Already many companies have been embracing parallel computing. These include open source implementations of Google's MapReduce, a software framework that lets tasks be completed simultaneously across many computers. Parallel computing can accelerate and shape data-intensive tasks such as mashups, search, and CRM as a service. But few universities are imparting skills in parallel computing before the Google-IBM initiative.
The timing of the joint effort is appropriate because the lack of human resources is a top concern for CIOs in the parallel computing domain. A recent survey by the Society for Information Management highlighted the shortfall of pros in this domain.
"Companies would love to hire students with these types of skills, but I don't even know how some of these companies would find or train these people," said Dennis Quan, CTO of IBM's high-performance, on-demand solutions group.
Academia has fallen behind in this area, said Randy Bryant, dean of Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science, one of the participating schools. Most undergraduates don't see or learn about the databases and data centers that companies are building. "Quite honestly, we're just not covering that in our courses," Bryant said.
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P R Sai is a contributing editor for ContactCenterSolutions. To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.