Intel (previous CloudAve coverage), the chipmaker with increasing focus on cloud computing, yesterday announced a $30M investment in research on the future of cloud and embedded computing. As a part of this investment, Intel will set up two Intel Science and Technology Centers (ISTC) at Carnege Mellon University, a leading research organization in the field of computer science and engineering. This investment is part of Intel’s broader $100 Million program designed to help universities increase research in various fields of technology and accelerate innovation.
This investment is interesting because of the larger focus on cloud computing. Additionaly, I am interested in this news because the funding will help augment Intel’s Cloud 2015 vision which sees the near future of cloud computing as a world of interoperable “federated” clouds with “automated” movement of software applications and resources. This is exactly the kind of vision I am advocating in this blog by pimping the idea of federated cloud hard. The center combines top researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of California Berkeley, Princeton University, and Intel. The researchers will explore technology that will have has important future implications for the cloud, including built-in application optimization, more efficient and effective support of big data analytics on massive amounts of online data, and making the cloud more distributed and localized by extending cloud capabilities to the network edge and even to client devices.
Any industry academia partnership is good for the future of cloud computing. In the early days of CloudAve, I have covered quite a bit about various academic initiatives in the field. We have some of the smartest folks (those who are blindly opposed to academia, take it easy and I am not here for a political debate) in the halls of academia and bringing their knowledge with the industry’s passion can accelerate innovation. In fact, such partnerships by larger companies with academia will not only help in short term innovations but also in accelerating the next iteration of computing beyond cloud computing.
Disclosure: Intel is the sponsor of this blog
This is one of the best moves of Intel. There’s no doubt that cloud computing is the way of the future; thus, it’s important that the newer generation would be able to understand how it works. There’s also a very high chance that the company’s going to discover gems among them.