HPCI, Google Team Up to Offer Cutting-Edge Cloud Computing Course

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April 20, 2009

When Ryan Braley, a senior in computational math and computer science, talks about ASU’s new cloud computing course, he literally cannot stay still. As someone who has learned the most cutting-edge computer science from his classmates and from his own research, Braley says that most of what educators and industry members teach about parallel programming is outdated. “The truth is, we’ve never actually moved away from the methods of the ‘60s,” he explains. Now, these old notions are being dismantled by courses such as the cloud computing class offered by ASU and Google, Inc.— only one of five such courses currently offered in the country.

The class has three instructors: ASU’s technology officer Adrian Sannier, associate professor Raghu Santanam and the director of the High Performance Computing Initiative (HPCI), Dan Stanzione. The course teaches both computer science and business majors the techniques involved in cloud computing, as well as its value. Cloud computing represents programs that users can interact with anywhere online. For instance, after logging in, users of various Google Applications can send and receive messages, create documents, chat with other users, and create and update profiles.

The same holds true for various social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook. As Joseph Adams, an academic associate and HPCI liaison explains, the difference between cloud computing and applications with more traditional methods is how effortless various options become for the user: “With something like Adobe, you technically have to do more work. When there’s an update or a new feature, the program has to ask you for permission to download it. Whereas Google offers Google Docs and other new features all the time, but you never have to do anything but click and start using it. All of the work is done for you, so all people have to do is start using.”

As a result, cloud computing has become the new buzzword in business. The new ASU class teaches business majors what makes these applications useful and how to harness its capabilities. The sheer popularity of Gmail and Facebook already offer plenty of evidence. For computer science majors such as Braley, it is an opportunity to stay ahead of the curve and land a dream job that supports his passion for computer programming: “I’ve been evangelizing these methods to my professors forever,” Braley says, “and they’ve never heard of them. So when I sat in this class and realized I was about to learn how to actually do these things, I just melted.” Although the technology used today illustrates how unprepared standard computing can be for the demands of modern living, Braley believes that cloud computing—and courses similar to this one—represent a new beginning: “We’ve only begun to scratch the surface of [parallel programming],” he says with a grin.