Carnegie Mellon University’s innovative Parallel Data Lab (PDL) has received $487,500 for cloud supercomputing research from Intel, the world’s largest manufacturer of semiconductor products.

“This financial support affords us an excellent platform for open collaboration research into the underlying technologies so essential to allowing cloud computing to reach the promise of dramatically improving efficiency, ubiquity and productivity for all scales of user–facing applications across many areas of information technology,” said PDL Director Gregory Ganger, the Stephen F. Jatras Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at CMU.

Ganger also is a co-principal investigator of the Intel Science and Research Center (ISTC) for cloud supercomputing at CMU along with Phil Gibbons, an Intel research scientist and an adjunct professor in computer science.

“This support helps drive development and implementation of strategies to explore emerging technologies within a university research environment,” said Scott Buck, university program officer for Intel.

Ganger, an expert in the risks and benefits of cloud computing, reports that cloud computing has the potential to provide large efficiency improvements for both industry and federal government information technology functions. Cloud computing involves using someone else’s computers (and possibly software) to accomplish a task rather than one’s own. Ganger has recommended that the U.S. government support standardization and research experimentation efforts in pursuit of cloud supercomputing’s potential.

For more than a decade, Intel has supported novel research by CMU faculty, including research into embedded computing designed to transform future experiences in the home, car and retail environment.