A CluE in the Search for Data-Intensive Computing

The Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate at the National Science Foundation (NSF) released a solicitation for proposals for the new Cluster Exploratory (CluE) initiative. The CluE program was announced in February as a part of a relationship between Google, IBM and NSF. NSF hopes this initiative will help lead to innovations in the field of data-intensive computing, as well as serve as an example for future collaborations between the private sector and the academic computing research community.

CluE will provide NSF-funded scientists access to software and services running on a Google-IBM cluster to explore innovative research ideas in data-intensive computing. NSF will allocate cluster computing resources for a broad range of proposals which will explore the potential of this technology to contribute to science and engineering research and produce applications which promise to benefit society as a whole.

"The software and services that run on these data clusters provide a brand new paradigm for highly parallel, highly reliable distributed computing, particularly for processing massive amounts of data," said Jeannette Wing, assistant director for CISE at NSF. Academic scientists have expressed a need for access to similar computing resources that will allow them to engage and explore this emerging and pervasive model of computing.........