Feeling burnt out after four years building search algorithms for Google software projects, Bisciglia, 27, floated an idea to CEO Eric Schmidt about starting a college course on large-scale computing. "When I recruit students, I ask them what would you do if you had 1,000 times more data?" Bisciglia says. "They don't know how to answer because as undergrads they were never given the opportunity to experiment with systems that big." So Bisciglia launched a course at Washington, his alma mater, to teach students how to program a network of hundreds of thousands of servers by using one of Google's remote data centers as a test bed. Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and Tsinghua University in Beijing have picked up on the idea, offering similar classes to their students, and Bisciglia has since worked out comparable deals with Berkeley and Stanford. Still restless, Bisciglia, has moved on to his next big plan - figuring out how to make Google successful in China.
Last updated January 22 2008: 8:01 AM ET
