Maryland Joins Research Initiative to Help Students Learn to Program "In the Clouds."

Assist. Prof. Jimmy Lin College of Information Studies University of Maryland

COLLEGE PARK, Md. - The University of Maryland is one of six universities across the United States involved in a new research initiative aimed at exploring a revolutionary programming paradigm called "cloud computing" using remote data centers rather than more limited desktop computers.

Google and IBM are sponsoring this research initiative to provide students with the highly technical and complex computer training they will need as computer programmers in the future. Corporations fear that without an initiative like this, there will be a shortage of skilled employees - a shortage that will limit their ability to compete with other corporations around the world.

An IBM release says, "Students will learn how to develop systems and write massively parallel applications that take full advantage of the distributed computing paradigm rather than the conventional one-server, one-application model." Google says, "It's no longer enough to program one machine well; to tackle tomorrow's challenges, students need to be able to program thousands of machines to manage massive amounts of data in the blink of an eye."

College of Information Studies Assistant Professor Jimmy Lin will lead the Cloud Computing project here at the University of Maryland. Lin, with other faculty and students in the Computational Linguistics and Information Processing (CLIP) laboratory at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS), will be focusing on research involving large scale natural language processing, with applications in search, automatic extraction of knowledge from documents, and machine translation from foreign languages into English.

"Cloud Computing" involves the creation of large clusters of processors networked together in data centers. Industry giants I.B.M. and Google say they will each will spend upwards of $25 million each to develop the data centers, open standards software and associated services. Each data center will hold thousands of processors that can run in parallel - offering a huge amount of processing power. "In today's highly-interconnected world where we expect Internet access wherever we go, there's no reason why computing services shouldn't be provided in the same manner," says Professor Lin. "I want access to vast processing power where ever I am, and with cloud computing, I can. The physical location of those processors is irrelevant - they could be next door or halfway around the world."

University of Maryland researchers have developed a supercomputer on a chip that uses parallel processing.

Maryland Lab to Advance Revolution in Language Technology for U.S.

In fact, the data centers will be powerful enough to do what is called "Internet-scale computing challenges" like those Maryland's students and faculty will undertake. It can be accessed by many users at one time - running a number of different programs. Sharing resources ultimately will save money for universities like Maryland, since it won't have to expand its own data centers. Ultimately, the hope is to let colleges and universities throughout the U.S. use the data centers for "Cloud Computing" research.

Chris Dyer, a graduate student in the Department of Linguistics, has already been "programming in the clouds." He says, "I'm using it to estimate phrase-based translation models. What normally takes a day or so with my normal single-process script, I can now do in about 20 minutes on the cluster." "Very cool. Very fast", concurs Tamer Elsayed, a graduate student in the Department of Computer Science, who just returned from an internship at Google, and Tim Hawes, another graduate student who's been working with the cluster.

Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, the University of California-Berkeley, the University of Washington and Massachusetts Institute of Technology are also involved in the research initiative.

I.B.M. Release on the "Cloud Computing" Initiative
Google's Release on the "Cloud Computing" Initiative

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