Open Cirrus, the joint collaboration on cloud computing research formed by Yahoo, Intel and HP last year, has added three new international research organizations to join the open source test bed for cloud computing research.

The new research organizations that are joining Open Cirrus, include the Russian Academy of Sciences, South Korea’s Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute and MIMOS, a strategic research and development organization under the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation in Malaysia.

Launched in July 2008, Open Cirrus was created by the three tech giants 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 test bed, which has more than 50 research projects currently underway, simulates a real-life, global, Internet-scale environment and lets researchers test applications and measure the performance of applications and services that are built to run on large-scale cloud systems.

As we wrote last year, the Open Cirrus is a way for Yahoo to get its foot in the cloud computing space and a channel for Intel and HP to further their position as leaders in cloud computing technology. It should be interesting to see what innovations come out of the collaboration.