In October 2007, Google and IBM announced the first pilot phase of the Academic Cloud Computing Initiative (ACCI), which granted several prominent U.S. universities access to a large computer cluster running Hadoop, an open source distributed computing platform inspired by Google’s file system and MapReduce programming model. In February 2008, the ACCI partnered with the National Science Foundation to provide grant funding to academic researchers interested in exploring large-data applications that could take advantage of this infrastructure. This resulted in the creation of the Cluster Exploratory (CLuE) program led by Dr. Jim French, which currently funds 14 projects from 17 universities.

Nearing the two year anniversary of this collaboration, the National Science Foundation is sponsoring a meeting for the CLuE project principal investigators (PIs). This will event will be open to the public—in fact, the explicit goal of this event is to showcase the exciting research currently underway in academia and promote closer ties with the broader "cloud computing" community in the bay area.

For more details, see event homepage. The location of this event has not been finalized yet, but it will be in or near Mountain View, California.