KEY POINTS:
Google and IBM have joined forces to promote new software developments to address the challenges of large internet-scale applications in the future.
Along with several American universities, the companies say the aim of the project is to help students and researchers better understand emerging technologies in the large-scale distributed computing arena.
The companies are committing significant amounts of hardware and software to the project which will help tackle challenging applications needed for search, social networking and mobile commerce to run quickly and cheaply.
Tasks need to be farmed out to run across multiple servers simultaneously.
They have dedicated a large cluster of several hundred computers including Google machines and IBM BladeCenter and System x servers. The cluster is expected to grow to more than 1600 processors.
The servers will run open source software including Linux, XEN systems virtualisation and Apache's Hadoop project, an open source version of Google's MapReduce and Google File System.
- NZ HERALD STAFF
