Any veteran of computer science academia will tell you that what passes for architectural state-of-the-art in the industry today had been solved and discussed in the hallways of universities decades ago. Whereas academia leads industry in architectural ideas, it is less clear who leads who in the infrastructure-heavy world of cloud computing. Academics have successfully devised scalable, fault-tolerant systems and implemented proofs of their concept but it is in the realm of industry, which has the money to invest in capital-intensive infrastructure, that these ideas have been thoroughly vetted and fine-tuned.
Cloud computing is causing a quiet revolution in how the IT industry is understood these days. Leaving academia behind for reasons of insufficient capital would be dangerous to the future of new ideas, which is why HP, Intel and Yahoo are collaborating to create “a globally distributed, Internet-scale testing environment designed to encourage research on the software, data center management and hardware issues associated with cloud computing at a larger scale than ever before.” Other collaborators include the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany. This effort brings to mind similar programs from IBM-Google, Intel-Microsoft and Yahoo’s support of Hadoop.
Being firm believers that standards-based computing will play an ever bigger role in the cloud era, we are delighted to see a broad consortium drawn from academia, industry and government forming around issues in cloud computing. Far be it from me to suggest that computing be regulated as a public utility, but this is the sort of know-how that is crucial to the future of computing. Now, academics who would have never given a thought to joining industry can join their industry peers in testing out pioneering ideas on some respectable infrastructure and we will all be the wiser for it.
