The hunger for Google computing put Bisciglia in a predicament. He had been fortunate to push through the order for the first cluster of computers. Could he do that again and again, eventually installing mini-Google clusters in each computer science department? Surely not. To extend Google 101 to universities around the world, the participants needed to plug into a shared resource. Bisciglia needed a bigger cloud.

That's when luck descended on the Googleplex in the person of IBM Chairman Samuel J. Palmisano. This was "Sam's day at Google," says an IBM researcher. The winter day was a bit chilly for beach volleyball in the center of campus, but Palmisano lunched on some of the fabled free cuisine in a cafeteria. Then he and his team sat down with Schmidt and a handful of Googlers, including Bisciglia. They drew on whiteboards and discussed cloud computing. It was no secret that IBM wanted to deploy clouds to provide data and services to business customers. At the same time, under Palmisano, IBM had been a leading promoter of open-source software, including Linux. This was a key in Big Blue's software battles, especially against Microsoft. If Google and IBM teamed up on a cloud venture, they could construct the future of this type of computing on Google-based standards, including Hadoop.

Google, of course, had a running start on such a project: Bisciglia's Google 101. In the course of that one day, Bisciglia's small venture morphed into a major initiative backed at the CEO level by two tech titans. By the time Palmisano departed that afternoon, it was established that Bisciglia and his IBM counterpart, Dennis Quan, would build a prototype of a joint Google-IBM university cloud.

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Over the next three months they worked together at Google headquarters. (It was around this time, Bisciglia says, that the cloud project evolved from 20% into his full-time job.) The work involved integrating IBM's business applications and Google servers, and equipping them with a host of open-source programs, including Hadoop. In February they unveiled the prototype for top brass in Mountain View, Calif., and for others on video from IBM headquarters in Armonk, N.Y. Quan wowed them by downloading data from the cloud to his cell phone. (It wasn't relevant to the core project, Bisciglia says, but a nice piece of theater.)

The Google 101 cloud got the green light. The plan was to spread cloud computing first to a handful of U.S. universities within a year and later to deploy it globally. The universities would develop the clouds, creating tools and applications while producing legions of computer scientists to continue building and managing them.

Those developers should be able to find jobs at a host of Web companies, including Google. Schmidt likes to compare the data centers to the prohibitively expensive particle accelerators known as cyclotrons. "There are only a few cyclotrons in physics," he says. "And every one if them is important, because if you're a top-flight physicist you need to be at the lab where that cyclotron is being run. That's where history's going to be made; that's where the inventions are going to come. So my idea is that if you think of these as supercomputers that happen to be assembled from smaller computers, we have the most attractive supercomputers, from a science perspective, for people to come work on."

As the sea of business and scientific data rises, computing power turns into a strategic resource, a form of capital. "In a sense," says Yahoo Research Chief Prabhakar Raghavan, "there are only five computers on earth." He lists Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon. Few others, he says, can turn electricity into computing power with comparable efficiency.

All sorts of business models are sure to evolve. Google and its rivals could team up with customers, perhaps exchanging computing power for access to their data. They could recruit partners into their clouds for pet projects, such as the company's clean energy initiative, announced in November. With the electric bills at jumbo data centers running upwards of $20 million a year, according to industry analysts, it's only natural for Google to commit both brains and server capacity to the search for game-changing energy breakthroughs.

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Discuss: Google and the 'clouds' concept

What will research clouds look like? Tony Hey, vice-president for external research at Microsoft, says they'll function as huge virtual laboratories, with a new generation of librarians — some of them human — "curating" troves of data, opening them to researchers with the right credentials. Authorized users, he says, will build new tools, haul in data, and share it with far-flung colleagues. In these new labs, he predicts, "you may win the Nobel prize by analyzing data assembled by someone else." Mark Dean, head of IBM's research operation in Almaden, Calif., says that the mixture of business and science will lead, in a few short years, to networks of clouds that will tax our imagination. "Compared to this," he says, "the Web is tiny. We'll be laughing at how small the Web is." And yet, if this "tiny" Web was big enough to spawn Google and its empire, there's no telling what opportunities could open up in the giant clouds.

It's a mid-November day at the Googleplex. A jetlagged Christophe Bisciglia is just back from China, where he has been talking to universities about Google 101. He's had a busy time, not only setting up the cloud with IBM but also working out deals with six universities — U-Dub, Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Maryland — to launch it. Now he's got a camera crew in a conference room, with wires and lights spilling over a table. This is for a promotional video about cloud education that they'll release, at some point, on YouTube.

Eric Schmidt comes in. At 52, he is nearly twice Bisciglia's age, and his body looks a bit padded next to his protégé's willowy frame. Bisciglia guides him to a chair across from the camera and explains the plan. They'll tape the audio from the interview and then set up Schmidt for some stand-alone face shots. "B-footage," Bisciglia calls it. Schmidt nods and sits down. Then he thinks better of it. He tells the cameramen to film the whole thing and skip stand-alone shots. He and Bisciglia are far too busy to stand around for B footage.

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