From NYT  Google and I.B.M. Join in ‘Cloud Computing’ Research.

Cloud computing research try to find the answers on how to build large data centers with an infrastructure that can scale, offer processing power and data integrity.
All essential ingredients if you want to create a successful Internet service.

With a blog post with the title let a thousand servers bloom Google presents the initiative and some educational material.
Very interesting five-part video lecture series (originally offered to Google Engineering interns) that introduces some of the fundamental concepts of large-scale cluster computing.