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HP, Intel and Yahoo are announcing that they have teamed up to build a cloud computing research facility.  The Cloud is now taking over the PC as the mediium of storage for most applications.  Back in the 90's, the PC was the back bone of the computing world, applications and documents and data were all in a user's PC.  Today however, the PC is becoming a mere vessel to access the more information from the cloud and all the applications, and data are already making  the transfer from the PC hard drive to Cloud Servers on the internet.

It's this transition that has prompted 3 of the biggest names in computing to team up and find ways to better cloud computing.  HP, Intel and Yahoo today announced the creation of a global, multi-data center, 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 three big companies have also teamed up with the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany to form the research initiative. The partnership with Illinois also includes the National Science Foundation.

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 center 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.

There will be six "centers of excelence" meaning six data centers which will make up the test cloud or test bed.  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.

Yahoo will provide the software and 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.”

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