HP, Intel, and Yahoo announced Tuesday that they have teamed up to create a "test bed" project for research in cloud computing, the umbrella term for outsourcing hardware and software capabilities rather than handling them locally.
Dubbed The HP, Intel, and Yahoo Cloud Computing Test Bed, the open source project will consist of data centers around the globe "to promote open collaboration among industry, academia and governments by removing the financial and logistical barriers to research in data-intensive, Internet-scale computing". They have partnered with the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as well as the National Science Foundation.
Using largely HP hardware and Intel processors, six initial data centers will be built at those locations, each with 1,000 to 4,000 processor cores (that is probably about 125 to 500 servers); they are expected to become functional later this year. Researchers from all three companies as well as the host institutions will have access to the project.
Yahoo's commitment to cloud computing stems from its involvement in the Apache Hadoop project, an open source project for large-scale data processing, similar to Google's proprietary MapReduce software. Yahoo formed a cloud computing group as part of a major reorganization in June, and earlier this year partnered with a research facility in India to make one of the world's fastest supercomputers available for cloud computing research.
CNET News' Stephen Shankland contributed to this report.
This article was first published as a blog on CNET News.com.
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