Universities Are Early Adopters on Containers

Today's HP-Yahoo-Intel initiative on cloud computing highlights the importance of the academic and research communities in the development of cloud technologies and the wokforce to implement them. But universities are also proving to be an important emerging market for data center containers.

The University of California at San Diego has purchased one Sun MD (Blackbox) portable data center in a shipping container, and will soon purchase another. The container deals were made possible by $2 million in funding from the National Science Foundation. UC San Diego's use of containers was detailed in a blog post this week about its Project GreenLight initiative to connect scientists and their labs to more energy-efficient "green" computer processing and storage systems using photonics.

The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) was the first customer to get a Blackbox from Sun Microsystems, and has since acquired a second Sun MD.

Yahoo (YHOO) has deployed one of Rackable's ICE Cube units to support the M45 Supercomputing Project with Carnegie Mellon University.