New York (NY) - IT companies are becoming more active in making sure that there will be enough engineers that will be able to handle emerging technologies such as parallel computing.

Following examples such as the one set by Nvidia, which supplied course materials and even speakers to several universities around the country to teach stream processing via its CUDA platform, Google and IBM today said that they will be providing “hardware, software and services to augment university curricula and expand research horizons.” The companies hope that their support will “lower the financial and logistical barriers for the academic community” to explore what both describe as “Internet-scale applications”.

According to a press release, the University of Washington was the first to join the initiative. Carnegie-Mellon University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Maryland also confirmed to participate.

Google and IBM said they have dedicated a large cluster of several hundred computers that is planned to grow to more than 1600 processors to the project. Students will be able to access the system 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, including MapReduce and the Google File System (GFS).

A curriculum developed by Google and the University of Washington has been published at http://code.google.com/edu/content/parallel.html