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.
