Heads in the clouds: HP, Intel and Yahoo!

Davey Winder
Wednesday, 30 July 2008 18:33

Business IT - Networking

Three of the IT powerhouses have got together and created a global, multi-data centre, open source test bed for the advancement of cloud computing research.

HP, Intel and Yahoo! have announced their collaboration in creating a global cloud computing research test bed centre.

By providing a globally distributed and truly Internet-scale testing environment, designed firmly to encourage research of larger scale cloud computing related issues involving software, data center management and hardware, the trio have some high hopes.

Not least the main goal of the initiative which is to "promote open collaboration among industry, academia and governments." They say they will achieve this by removing the financial and logistical barriers to research in a data-intensive and Internet-scale computing environment.

The companies have partnered with the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) as well as the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (which includes the National Science Foundation) and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany.

The research project will consist initially of six centres of excellence based 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 of these will play host to a dedicated cloud computing infrastructure which will be, for the most part, based upon HP hardware and Intel processors. Talking of which, each will have between 1,000 to 4,000 processor cores to support the data-intensive research envisaged.

The test beds will run Apache Hadoop, an open source distributed computing project from the Apache Software Foundation, as well as other open source software such as Yahoo's own parallel programming language called Pig.

Expected to be fully operation later this year, researchers wanting access will have to go through an as yet to be announced selection process.

“To realize 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 lets us tap the brightest minds in the industry, academia and government to drive innovation in this area.”