HP said it has formed an alliance with Intel Corporation and Yahoo, to create a global, multi-data centre, open source test bed for the advancement of cloud computing research and education.

The goal of the initiative is to promote open collaboration among industry, academia and governments by removing the financial and logistical barriers to research in data-intensive, Internet-scale computing.

The cloud is about using IT as a service, delivered by virtualised resources that could be located anywhere; it uses a shared infrastructure, is available on-demand and is highly flexible and automated.

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 centre 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.

HP, Intel and Yahoo! have partnered with the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany to form the research initiative.

The test bed will initially consist of six centres of excellence at IDA facilities, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Steinbuch Centre for Computing  of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, HP Labs, Intel Research and Yahoo!.

Each location will host a cloud computing infrastructure, largely based on HP hardware and Intel processors, and will have 1,000 to 4,000 processor cores capable of supporting the data-intensive research associated with cloud computing.

The test bed locations are expected to be fully operational and made accessible to researchers worldwide through a proposal selection process later this year. 

The test bed will leverage Yahoo!’s technical leadership in open source projects by running Apache Hadoop – an open source, distributed computing project of the Apache Software Foundation – and other open source, distributed computing software such as Pig, the parallel programming language developed by Yahoo! Research.

’The HP, Intel and Yahoo! Cloud Computing Test Bed furthers our commitment to the global, collaborative research community that is advancing the new sciences of the Internet,’ said Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo! Research.

’With this test bed, not only can researchers test applications at Internet scale, they will also have access to the underlying computing systems to advance understanding of how systems software and hardware function in a cloud environment.’

Researchers at HP Labs, the central research arm of HP, will use the test bed to conduct advanced research in the areas of intelligent infrastructure and dynamic cloud services.

HP Labs recently sharpened its focus to help HP and its customers capitalise on the industry’s shift toward cloud computing, a driving force behind HP’s vision of Everything as a Service.

With Everything as a Service, devices and services will interact seamlessly through the cloud, and businesses and individuals will use services that anticipate their needs based on location, preferences, calendar and communities.

’To realise the full potential of cloud computing, the technology industry must think about the cloud as a platform for creating new services and experiences. This requires an entirely new approach to the way we design, deploy and manage cloud infrastructure and services,’ said Prith Banerjee, senior vice president of Research at HP and director of HP Labs.

’The HP, Intel and Yahoo! Cloud Computing Test Bed let us tap the brightest minds in the industry, academia and government to drive innovation in this area.’

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