Hewlett-Packard, Intel Corporation and Yahoo! Inc. have announced their teaming up for what can be one of the massive projects in the tech world. The three giants have decided to launch a global, multi-data center open source test bed for the advancement of cloud computing research and education.
Assisting them in their projects will be Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), the University of Illinois (including National Science Foundation) at Urbana-Champaign, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany.
The test-bed will start off with six-centers at the three institutes that will provide a global platform for testing and researching on softwares, data center management and hardwares, bringing together industries, academia and government, which is the main objective of the project.
“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.”
“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.”
The HP, Intel and Yahoo! Cloud Computing Test Bed will be facilitated by resources coming form the three companies like HP hardware and Intel processors including 1,000 to 4,000 processor cores that are build up to stand the intensive cloud computing.
“We are pleased to engage with the academic research community – open collaboration with the academia is in our DNA at Intel Research,” said Andrew A. Chien, vice president and director of Intel Research. “Creating large-scale test beds is important because they lower barriers to innovation and provide the opportunity to experiment and learn at scale. Intel’s support of Tashi, an open source cluster management system for cloud computing, and this HP, Intel, Yahoo! Cloud Computing Test Bed are a natural extension of our ongoing, mutually beneficial partnerships with the research community, such as the Universal Parallel Computing Research Centers.”
HP, Intel and Yahoo! claim to pluck out the financial and logistical obstacles involved in data-intensive researches and internet-scale computing.
The tests bed will start functioning by late 2008 and will be provided to the researchers throughout the world via a selection process.