Hispanic IT Students Get Boost From Latin American Grid, IBM Awards

IBM is investing in the Latin American Grid initiative, a cooperative research effort that helps stimulate local economies and prepare students for IT leadership positions. Hispanics currently represent 4% of U.S. computer science graduates.

MIAMI (By K.C. Jones, TechWeb News) December 16, 2005 — IBM is investing in the Latin American Grid initiative, a cooperative research effort.

The company announced the plans Friday during a kick-off ceremony at Florida International University. The LA Grid (pronounced lah-grid) will bring together students, faculty and researchers from Latin America, Spain and the United States (including those from IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center) to work on projects for applications in health care, life sciences, nanotechnology and regionally-specific areas like hurricane mitigation.

LA Grid aims to prepare students for leadership in information technology and stimulate local economics by attracting technology businesses and jobs in several regions, including Florida. IBM also announced plans to sponsor internships, mentoring and diversity programs.

Hispanics currently represent 3.9 percent of U.S. computer science graduates with Bachelor of Science degrees, 1.1 percent with Master of Science degrees, and 1.1 percent with Ph.D.s, according to a 2003-2004 Computing Research Association Taulbee Survey.

"FIU is already the largest producer of Hispanic engineers in the U.S. and the LA Grid initiative will further our ability to significantly increase the Hispanic representation in IT at a national scale," Dr. Vish Prasad, Executive Dean of College of Engineering and Computing at FIU said in a prepared statement.

IBM's highly-selective Shared University Research awards are funding the cooperative effort, which includes Florida International University, University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez, University of Miami, Barcelona Supercomputing Center and Monterrey Tech. The program will expand to include more universities. "The strong partnership between IBM and academia will play an important role in creating jobs, driving innovative technology into the marketplace and stimulating Florida's economy," Pete Martinez, vice president of IBM Business Consulting Services said Friday through a prepared statement.

The Shared University Research program provides equipment to higher education institutions to facilitate research projects in the architecture of business and processes, privacy and security, supply chain management, information based medicine, deep computing, Grid Computing, Autonomic Computing, storage solutions and other areas of mutual interest. More than 50 awards are distributed worldwide each year.

For LA Grid, IBM has donated BladeCenter equipment with attached fiber channel storage for the universities in Florida and Puerto Rico to seed the technology infrastructure. The equipment includes a chassis, six dual processor Intel Xeon-based blade servers, two dual processor POWER-based blade servers, an integrated fiber channel switch option and fiber channel storage.

IBM is also providing middleware and infrastructure software including free licensing of its Load Leveler software, WebSphere and DB2 Universal Database.