IBM was a 2009 project using the resources developed in 2007's IBM/Google Cloud Computing partnership. This initiative was to provide access to cloud computing for the universities of all countries.^[1]

This initiative was funded by the National Science Foundation awarding $5 million in grants to 14 universities, including Kyushu University, University of Washington, Carnegie Mellon University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.^[1] The goal of this initiative was to enhance university curricula in parallel programming techniques and to promote cloud computing research and development.^[2]

With funding help from the U.S. National Science Foundation, the cloud computing initiative provided assistance to hundreds of university scientists working on research projects.^[3]

By 2011, Google and IBM were completing the program since high-performance cloud computing clusters had become widely available to researchers at reasonable costs.^[4]