A new project that aims to research cloud computing networks and technologies has been launched by Bell Labs (News - Alert) in collaboration with students at the Tecnologico de Monterrey, Campus Cuernavaca School in Mexico. Bell, the research arm of Alcatel-Lucent, is working closely with students, who will use their knowledge and expertise to further Bell’s focus on cloud networking technologies.

The collaborative project is a testament to Bell’s increasing focus on cloud computing network designs used by organizations to link thousands of processors to a common communications network for storing and sharing data among millions of users.

Engineering students at the university will be supervised by Bell Labs researchers and professors at the school as they focus on the “Graphic Display in Cloud Computing Topology” for the project. The goal is to develop tools to aid in visualizing, monitoring and debugging applications that run in a large-scale, distributed computing environment.

The Mexican school is one of a growing number of colleges and universities with research programs centered on cloud computing. Intel (News - Alert) runs its Science and Technology Center for Cloud Computing (ISTC-CC), which is headquartered at Carnegie Mellon University and also involves Georgia Tech, Princeton, UC-Berkeley and the University of Washington. Other noteworthy institutions researching in the space include MIT (News - Alert), Cornell, the University of Chicago, UMass at Amherst, Boston University and Duke. The University of Washington is part of the IBM/Google Academic Cloud Computing Initiative (ACCI), designed to help students build out cloud infrastructures and applications.