HP, Intel, and Yahoo!'s Heads Are in the Clouds

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If you have any doubt that cloud computing is the next wave of remote and distributing computing and is poised to make major inroads into both the enterprise and consumer markets, then don't tell HP, Intel, or Yahoo!--who all just joined together in an initiative to create a "global, multi-data center, open source test bed for the advancement of cloud computing research and education."

"The HP, Intel and Yahoo! Cloud Computing Test Bed will provide a globally distributed, Internet-scale testing environment designed to encourage research on the software, data center management and hardware issues associated with cloud computing at a larger scale than ever before. The initiative will also support research of cloud applications and services."

Credit: HP

For this initiative, the three large corporations are also partnering with the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (including the National Science Foundation), and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. The "test bed" will actually be made up of mostly HP-based hardware with Intel processors, representing somewhere between 1,000 and 4,000 processor cores, located in six locations in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Yahoo! will supply the open-source software elements, such as the Java software framework, Apache Hadoop, and Yahoo! Research's distributed computing software, Parallel Programming Language (PIG).

"We are pleased to engage with the academic research community -- open collaboration with the academia is in our DNA at Intel Research," said Andrew A. Chien, vice president and director of Intel Research. "Creating large-scale test beds is important because they lower barriers to innovation and provide the opportunity to experiment and learn at scale."

In addition to serving the cloud computing research needs of HP, Intel, and Yahoo!, once the locations are fully up and running later this year, an official selection process will be put in place to allow researchers from other companies, organizations, and institutions to access the test bed.