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Recently, William Hurley, on his Infoworld blog, wrote an open letter to President Obama asking him to create a government funded National Computing Cloud.

I propose you create a government-funded computing cloud for use by all colleges and universities. Such a resource would level the academic playing field. Researchers toiling at thousands of smaller institutions would have access to computing power currently available only to a handful. We cannot predict from where the next great innovation will come, but public cloud computing would dramatically improve our collaboration and innovation as a nation.

I completely agree with him on the need for a National Compute Cloud. I have talked about the positive impact of Cloud Computing on academia many times in this blog. I am pretty confident that a move like what Mr. Hurley is proposing is bound to be a great leveler of the academic playing field.

I remember the good old days in India when I was part of Indian Institute of Technology, a supposedly premier institution in the country. Those days were cash crunched days in India and, as it always happen in tight situations, the then government found an easy target to cut money in order to shore up their balance sheets. The govt. drastically reduced the money they spent on these institutions and its impact were first felt on the floors of libraries. The institute had to axe the subscription to many of the expensive journals (remember, in those days, the dollar to rupee conversion was very high and the research journals were are very expensive) to cover up for the reduced funding. I was doing a research project in the Physics department and the loss of journals were threatening to put an end to our project.

Those were the early days of internet and it was mainly thriving in the academic institutions, thanks to the governments all over the world. Fortunately, Los Alamos National Laboratory came up with an idea to launch a repository of research papers (xxx.lanl.gov). It is one of the first of its kind open access publication of research papers and it changed the way research was done all over the world. It cut down the barriers to entry on the research front, at third world institutions and, also, at the ”poor” institutes in the developed world. We had a level playing field all around the world, at least in the theoretical fields of study. This was only possible due to the availability of internet in the academic institutions and a (Inter)National repository of research papers.

When I read Mr. Hurley’s post, I was immediately reminded of the positive impact of the free availability of internet and the national repository of research papers. I was immediately attracted towards his idea. I am pretty convinced, based on my past experience, that a National Computing Cloud will be a great leveler and Obama’s administration should seriously look into this idea.