Following a December 2006 meeting at Google’s Mountain View headquarters, Eric Schmidt and IBM’s CEO Samuel Palmisano decided to save some of the millions the two companies earn each year for a joint venture focused on teaching students how to program clusters of computers.

After reaching the conclusion that they share the same views upon the future of cluster computing, Schmidt and Palmisano also noticed that universities usually forget about teaching their students how to program massive clusters of computers, focusing only on single server-programming. That could soon translate into a shortage of workforce need for the administration of these huge data centers.

IBM and Google are trying to prevent that from happening with a joint investment of about $20-25 million in what is known as “cloud computing”, a type of data center that uses parallel computing and virtualization to maximize computing power per server.

Google’s partnership with IBM will include the acquisition of the hardware, the software and the services needed for the cloud-computing initiative. For the beginning, there will be a data center of only 400 computers, but the two companies’ CEOs have pledged the extension of the “cloud” to more than 4,000, scattered in different locations.

Universities included in the academic partnership are Carnegie Mellon University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, University of California at Berkeley and University of Maryland. The University of Washington in Seattle, which boasts with the invention of some of the programming techniques used in cloud computing, will lead the group of six universities.

"In order to most effectively serve the long-term interests of our users, it is imperative that students are adequately equipped to harness the potential of modern computing systems and for researchers to be able to innovate ways to address emerging problems," Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said in a statement.

Google and IBM are currently leaders in cloud-computing because they us this infrastructure to run software for their respective business (although Google has a slight advantage, because cloud computing is vital for the billions of search queries operated monthly through its servers).

Palmisano said the firms are trying to "take these two sets of skills- IBM's understanding of how enterprises use computing and Google's understanding of massive data flows and high-speed connections - and we believe we can create something significant."