Cleversafe Launches Academic DsNet Program With IIT
Cleversafe Inc. announced last week the launch of its Academic dsNet program, a collaborative undertaking to engage the industry's next generation of bright young scientists, engineers and designers at the most prominent academic research institutions in the country to study and contribute to disruptive technologies such as dispersed storage, currently being used to solve the growing global issue of unstructured data. Illinois Institute of Technology is the first university to join Cleversafe to study dispersed storage and will contribute to ongoing development for the industry.
“We are very excited about the opportunity to expose our students to real world applications and the challenges facing companies on a global scale,” said Computer Science Chair Xian-He Sun. “As a leading research and PhD granting institution it's invaluable for our students to have direct access to technology to conduct their research and to develop a relationship with companies such as Cleversafe who are visionary in their thinking to propel our students forward.”
The overall purpose of the Cleversafe Academic dsNet program is twofold: to collaborate with some of the most prominent universities in the U.S. that are anticipating industry needs for future-proofed storage systems, petabyte-scale data analytics and the global impact of persistent data growth and to expose bright young minds to this technology so they are ready and prepared to engage when they enter the industry.
“Cleversafe is in a perfect position to partner and engage with academia in the further research of data storage because of its success in the field of dispersed storage technology,” said Chris Gladwin, CEO and president of Cleversafe. “We've steered away from conventional methods of storage and it's that forward-thinking and creative approach that make us uniquely suited to engage the university community. The Academic dsNet program will allow us to collaborate and deliver scalable, affordable solutions in the age of petabytes and exabytes.”
Through the Academic dsNet program Cleversafe and IIT will have the opportunity to test and validate research in technology domains as well as publish that information through white papers and leading conferences and journals. All necessary hardware and software for the program has been provided by Cleversafe with ongoing support throughout the engagement. Planned projects at IIT with Cleversafe include:
- Exploration and redesign of scientific supercomputing centers to enable them to scale exponentially to meet the next decade's coming exascale computing needs.
- Evaluation of information dispersal as a reliable alternative to data replication currently being used to enable compute nodes to run metadata and data management at the user-level.
- Conducting further research to improve data locality in large-scale dispersed storage systems.
Cleversafe is one of many companies that got their start at University Technology Park at IIT.
From IIT Today, October 31, 2011
