Increasing access to computing clouds–globe-spanning network of computers and information such as Google’s–signals a fundamental shift in how we handle information.

The Google 101 project will spread cloud computing first to a handful of U.S. universities within a year and later deploy it globally.

Amazon has opened up its own networks of computers to paying customers, initiating new players to cloud computing. Yahoo has opened up a cluster of computers–a small cloud–for researchers at Carnegie Mellon University.

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.”