IBM is contributing a multi-million-dollar private cloud infrastructure to a group of post-secondary education institutions in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia who will share the platform to create a curriculum and do research to give graduates analytics skills.

The system, due to come online in early 2014, is being hosted at Dalhousie University but will also be accessible to faculty and students at Acadia University, Cape Breton University, Mount Saint Vincent University, Nova Scotia Community College, Saint Mary’s University and St. Francis Xavier University.

The cloud platform, based on IBM Flex System and IBM Storwize hardware, will run the Apache Software Foundation Virtual Computing Lab software, providing each school with scalable on-demand access to servers, storage, applications and services. The open source platform was designed specifically for education and research and will also include access to a range of IBM analytics software products.

Dan Fortin, president of IBM Canada, said cloud was providing big collaborative-research opportunities across the country. “This shared computing platform in Nova Scotia will support advanced research today, and will be used to build the much-needed analytics skills for tomorrow.”

Michael Shepherd, dean of the computer science faculty at Dallhousie University, said this kind of collaboration between the schools was unprecedented in the region. “The ability to share a common system among all schools enhances our ability to collaborate as educators and researchers,” he said.

“There are always benefits to working together and this shared infrastructure will really allow the consortium to leverage each institution’s unique programming, resulting in highly skilled students ready to enter the workforce.”

The contribution is part of an agreement IBM made in 2012 with the province's government, a local economic development organization and the school consortium. Another part of the agreement is the company's plan to locate a service delivery center in the province and a promise to create up to 500 highly skilled jobs by 2020.