National Science Foundation grant recipients will explore image processing, large-scale data analysis, improving the Internet, human genome sequencing, and other areas.
Information Week reports the National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded nearly $5 million in grants to 14 universities so they can participate in the IBM-Google cloud computing initiative for research projects.
Through the NSF's Cluster Exploratory, or CLuE, program, the universities will use software and services running on the IBM-Google data center. The companies launched the joint university initiative in 2007 to help teach computer science students.
Jeannette Wing, the assistant director for computer and information science and engineering at NSF, said academic researchers have said they need access to massively scaled computing infrastructures to complete data-intensive projects and research activities.
The university projects that will tap IBM-Google computers over the Internet will be exploring a variety of areas, including image processing, large-scale data analysis, improving the Internet, and human genome sequencing.
For example, regional grant recipient University of Maryland, College Park, is working on a more effective translation system for converting text from one language into another. The other regional grant recipient, University of Virginia, is working on image processing software for zooming in on digital images to reveal distortion-free details not seen on the original.
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