HP, Intel Corporation and Yahoo! Inc. 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 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.

HP, Intel and Yahoo! have partnered with the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany to form the research initiative. The partnership with Illinois also includes the National Science Foundation.

The test bed will leverage Yahoo!’s 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.

Commenting on this update, Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo! Research, said “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. 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.”

Researchers at HP Labs, the central research arm of HP, will use the test bed to conduct advanced research in the areas of intelligent infrastructure and dynamic cloud services. HP Labs recently sharpened its focus to help HP and its customers capitalize on the industry’s shift toward cloud computing, a driving force behind HP’s vision of Everything as a Service. With Everything as a Service, devices and services will interact seamlessly through the cloud, and businesses and individuals will use services that anticipate their needs based on location, preferences, calendar and communities.

Intel is a leading provider of platform technologies, including processors, chipsets, networking and SSD, for cloud computing data centers. Current platform features such as Data Center Management Interface, Node Manager  and virtualization have been designed to improve the manageability and energy efficiency of data centers. This open, collaborative research effort will give researchers full access to the system’s hardware for further innovation of existing and future platform features.

IDA will facilitate research in the test bed by providing its users with the computing resources required to develop cloud computing software and applications. IDA will also leverage the test bed and its industry partnerships to train local students and professionals on the technologies and programs associated with cloud computing.

Lalit /ITvoir Network