The University of Maryland is one of six universities across the United States involved in a new research initiative aimed at exploring a revolutionary programming paradigm called "cloud computing" using remote data centers rather than more limited desktop computers.

Google and I.B.M. are sponsoring this research initiative to provide students with the highly technical and complex computer training they will need as computer programmers in the future. Corporations fear that without an initiative like this, there will be a shortage of skilled employees - a shortage that will limit their ability to compete with other corporations around the world.

College of Information Studies Assistant Professor Jimmy Lin will lead the Cloud Computing project here at the University of Maryland. Lin, with other faculty and students in the Computational Linguistics and Information Processing (CLIP) laboratory at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS), will be focusing on research involving large scale natural language processing, with applications in search, automatic extraction of knowledge from documents, and machine translation from foreign languages into English.

"The University of Maryland is a natural fit for this new initiative from IBM and Google," said V.S. Subrahmanian, director of the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and professor of computer science. "We are one of the top five schools on the East coast in computer and information science, with particular leadership in natural language processing, machine translation of language and Web-based data mining."

"Cloud Computing" involves the creation of large clusters of processors networked together in data centers. Industry giants I.B.M. and Google say they will each spend upwards of $25 million each to develop the data centers, open standards software and associated services. Each data center will hold thousands of processors that can run in parallel - offering a huge amount of processing power. "In today's highly-interconnected world where we expect Internet access wherever we go, there's no reason why computing services shouldn't be provided in the same manner," says Professor Lin. "I want access to vast processing power where ever I am, and with cloud computing, I can. The physical location of those processors is irrelevant - they could be next door or halfway around the world."