As more facets of work and life move online and the Web expands beyond a communications network to become a platform for business and society, a new paradigm of large-scale distributed computing has emerged.

A new IBM-Google initiative aims to provide computer science students with a complete suite of open source-based development tools so they can gain the advanced programming skills necessary to innovate and address the challenges of this computing model—which uses many computers networked together through open standards—and thereby drive the Internet's next phase of growth.

The companies will provide hardware, software and services to augment university curricula and expand research horizons while lowering the financial and logistical barriers for the academic community to explore Internet-scale computing.

IBM and Google have already dedicated a large cluster of several hundred computers for this program, which is planned to grow to a few thousand servers over time.

Using this virtual IT lab, 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.

The University of Washington was the first to join the initiative, and a short list of other universities have since been added to pilot the program, including Carnegie-Mellon University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Maryland. In the future, the program will be expanded to include additional researchers, educators and scientists.

This initiative is part of IBM's longstanding commitment to furthering education, through such programs as the IBM Academic Initiative, and directly supports the company's drive to create a new multidisciplinary field of study in Services Science, Management and Engineering.