HP, Intel and Yahoo have teamed up to create the Cloud Computing Test Bed, creating a distributed computing platform for third-party research and application building. There will be six data centers spanning the globe, with the three other partners being, Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany.
According to the HP news release:
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.
At a conference call earlier today, representatives from the three companies noted that each partner will build their own test bed, with some aspects up and running now.
The project states a commitment to support open source software by running Apache Hadoop. HP’s focus will be intelligent infrastructure and cloud services, while Intel looks at important technology issues around hardware stack to drive performance and energy usage.
The current “everything as a service” philosophy contends that with little or no capital expenditure, business and users can access vital services. The distributed computing concept continues to gain traction, with the companies hoping to achieve a level of invisibility, with users creating applications at any scale, without worrying about the underlying architecture.