For the past four years, Joannes Vemorel, founder of Lokad, has taught the course, Sofware Engineering and Distributed Computing, at the École Normale Supérieure  (ENS) in Paris. The course covers the fundamental concepts underlying software engineering, with a particular interest in complex and/or distributed systems such as cloud computing, and we have provided Windows Azure resources to support the course and its students. 

As part of the course every year, Joannes asks a dozen first-year students to take over a software project. Last year, they created Clouster, a scalable clustering algorithm that runs on Windows Azure and this year, they created an online multiplayer strategy game built on Windows Azure called Sqwarea (square+war+area).  In order to further challenge the students, Vemorel mandated a complex connectivity rule in the game that required students to leverage some of the scalability features in Windows Azure. Check out the game here and, if you’re interested in learning more, be sure to read Vemorel’s post.