HP, Intel and Yahoo team up on cloud-computing research effort

Computerworld - Hewlett-Packard Co., Intel Corp. and Yahoo Inc. are embarking on a joint research project focused on cloud computing, an approach that already is starting to reshape IT and is leading to development of some of the world's largest data centers.

The three companies, in a joint announcement today, said they also will be working with universities in the U.S. and Germany and with the Singapore government's IT development agency as part of the new Cloud Computing Test Bed initiative. Cloud-computing infrastructures will be set up at six facilities around the world to support research on hardware, software and data center management issues related to large-scale, Internet-hosted computing, the companies said.

The cloud-computing setups will primarily be based on HP hardware equipped with Intel processors, with between 1,000 and 4,000 processor cores being installed at each of the facilities. The installations, which are expected to be up and running later this year, will run open-source software such as the Apache Software Foundation's Apache Hadoop distributed computing technology and Pig, a parallel programming language developed by Yahoo's research unit.

The new research effort may turn out to be the point of a spear that spurs a more concerted commercial push into cloud computing technologies by IT vendors. The cloud approach, which relies on an Internet-based architecture that is both scalable and flexible, can be used for internal, inside-the-firewall applications or to support computing services for external users.

The U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency, the Pentagon's IT arm, is among the users that are adopting the cloud model for internal uses. But the real attention thus far has been on Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp., which are both building massive data centers that will use cloud architectures to deliver online services to businesses and home users.

Martin Reynolds, an analyst at Gartner Inc., said that the approaches being taken by Google and Microsoft involve some specific applications. What Yahoo, HP and Intel want to do, he added, is to develop cloud-based systems that can handle a broader range of applications. The three companies and their partners will also look at the data center needs posed by such systems, including power and cooling requirements, management tools and hardware-latency issues.

"The challenge with cloud computing is making it truly scalable," Reynolds said. "You don't just have to build one huge cloud that is controlled by one huge vendor running just a very narrow set of applications."

HP, Intel and Yahoo hope that by banding together, they can foster increased collaboration among IT vendors, universities and government agencies on cloud computing, which they said is being hampered by "financial and logistical barriers."