HP, Yahoo and Intel partner on cloud computing

Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Yahoo have developed a global testbed to help businesses, government, academia and the IT industry develop and use cloud-based computing services, where applications and servers are hosted on the internet.

The partners aim to use the testbed to promote open collaboration by removing the financial and logistical barriers to research in data-intensive, internet-scale computing.

The research testbed will initially comprise five centres hosted at IDA facilities in Singapore, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Steinbuch Centre for Computing of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Yahoo, and HP Labs.

Each location will host a cloud computing infrastructure, largely based on HP hardware, and will have 1,000 to 4,000 processor cores capable of supporting the data-intensive research associated with cloud computing. The testbed locations will be fully operational and access will be made available to researchers through a proposal selection process later in 2008.

IBM and Amazon have both developed cloud computing infrastructures, which users can access for a small monthly fee.