Obama: Build a Higher Education Cloud

Posted at January 27, 2009

In a blog post at InfoWorld, William Hurley writes an open letter to President Barack Obama. In it, he asks for a cloud computing platform for higher education.

He argues that in a time of budget shortfalls and cutbacks, faculty, staff and students have the ideas but lack the resources to gain access to the technology platforms needed to make their research a reality. He goes on to say:

I propose you create a government-funded computing cloud for use by all colleges and universities. Such a resource would level the academic playing field. Researchers toiling at thousands of smaller institutions would have access to computing power currently available only to a handful. We cannot predict from where the next great innovation will come, but public cloud computing would dramatically improve our collaboration and innovation as a nation.

This would be interesting project for an organization like Educause to take a look at, and treat it like Interet2, where everyone contributes and then gets access to the resources.

The computer science professor who wants to try his unit testing software on 1,000 nodes is very easy at Amazon, and near impossible to do on a campus these days. But the cloud doesn’t need to be limited to just computing sciences. Natural Sciences and humanities also can use the cloud for their needs as well.

Filed under: Amazon AWS

If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.

Comments

2 Responses to “Obama: Build a Higher Education Cloud”