That anti-Microsoft pair, IBM and Google, are kicking in $20 million-$25 million apiece for hardware, software and services to spread the gospel of "cloud computing" in the academe.

They want budding computer scientists to learn how to write Internet-scale programs that process trillions of secure transactions a day and master massively parallel computing skills.

The University of Washington, Carnegie-Mellon, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley and the University of Maryland have joined the initiative and will share a large Linux cluster of several hundred computers composed of Google machines and IBM BladeCenters and System x servers.

The plan is to grow it to 1,600 processors.

The widgetry currently includes Xen virtualization and Apache's Hadoop project, an open source implementation of Google's published computing infrastructure, specifically MapReduce and the Google File System.