Google meets King Kong, er, IBM

For an Internet-Scale Computing project, king of big iron IBM is partnering with none other than Google, the prince of fast, cheap velcro-intensive computing. The two companies have dedicated a large cluster of several hundred computers (a combination of Google machines and IBM BladeCenter and System x servers) that is planned to grow to more than 1,600 processors. College Students at UWash, Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and other schools will access the cluster via the Internet to test their parallel programming course projects. The servers will run open source software including the Linux operating system, XEN systems virtualization and Apache’s Hadoop project, an open source implementation of Google’s published computing infrastructure, specifically MapReduce and the Google File System (GFS).
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/22414.wss