Google, IBM working on similar Hadoop project for universities

Looks like we're ahead of the curve with our Hadoop project - at least in terms of realizing how cool it will be. Google and IBM have announced that they will be creating more classes like UW Seattle's 490H at more universities.
Our project is inspired by and modeled after UW Seattle's CS490H, which teaches students to program in the MapReduce framework. This helps Google acclimate new hires more quickly as they already know how to create programs with Google's tools. We're covering essentially the same material as that course, with the added work of creating the cluster and benchmarking Hadoop against our supervising professor's own distributed framework.

"For this project, the two companies have dedicated a large cluster of several hundred computers (a combination of Google machines and IBM BladeCenter and System x servers) that is planned to grow to more than 1,600 processors. Students will access the cluster via the Internet to test their parallel programming course projects."

I'd love to get a chance to access that network, for the simple reason that 64 < 1600. It's probably worth contacting those at Google and IBM who are running the project and see if we can't get some access. Share the Hadoop love, as it were.