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Today, the National Science Foundation announced it has awarded
nearly five million dollars in grants to fourteen universities
through its Cluster Exploratory (CLuE) program to participate in the
IBM/Google Cloud Computing University Initiative. The initiative will
provide the computing infrastructure for leading-edge research
projects that could help us better understand our planet, our bodies,
and pursue the limits of the World Wide Web.

In 2007, IBM and Google announced a joint university initiative to
help computer science students gain the skills they need to build
cloud applications. Now, the National Science Foundation is using the
same infrastructure and open source methods to award CLuE grants to
universities around the United States. Through this program,
universities will use software and services running on an IBM/Google
cloud to explore innovative research ideas in data-intensive
computing. These projects cover a range of activities that could lead
not only to advances in computing research, but also to significant
contributions in science and engineering more broadly.

The National Science Foundation awarded Cluster Exploratory (CLuE)
program grants to Carnegie-Mellon University, Florida International
University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Purdue
University, University of California-Irvine, University of California-
San Diego, University of California-Santa Barbara, University of
Maryland, University of Massachusetts, University of Virginia,
University of Washington, University of Wisconsin, University of Utah
and Yale University.

“Academic researchers have expressed a need for access to massively
scaled computing infrastructures that allow them to complete projects
and research activities that have been difficult or impossible
previously due to the amount of data involved.” said Jeannette Wing,
the Assistant Director for Computer & Information Science and
Engineering at the National Science Foundation. We are pleased to
provide the awards to these fourteen universities, enabling
researchers to engage with and explore this emerging and pervasive
model of computing.

“IBM is intensely focused on applying technology and science to make
the world work better”, said Willy Chiu, Vice President, IBM Cloud
Labs. “IBM is thrilled to power the groundbreaking studies taking
place at these prestigious universities, and to help enable
researchers and students around the world tackle some of the biggest
problems of our time.”

“We’re pleased and excited that the CluE program will support a wide
range of original research,” said Alfred Spector, Google’s Vice
President for Research and Special Initiatives. “We’re looking
forward to seeing the grantees solve challenging problems across
various fields through creative applications of distributed computing.”

The universities will run a wide range of advanced projects and
explore innovative research ideas in data-intensive computing,
including advancements in image processing, comparative studies of
large-scale data analysis, studies and improvements to the Internet,
and human genome sequencing, among others, using software and
services on the IBM/Google cloud infrastructure.

Specifically, the UCSB group will explore many of today’s data-
intensive application domains, including searches on social networks
like Facebook and protein matching in bioinformatics, all of which
require us to answer complex queries on highly-connected data. The
UCSB Massive Graphs in Clusters (MAGIC) project is focused on
developing software infrastructure that can efficiently answer
queries on extremely large graph datasets. The MAGIC software will
provide an easy to use interface for searching and analyzing data,
and manage the processing of queries to efficiently take advantage of
computing resources like large datacenters.