NG - Press - HP, Intel And Yahoo Build A Cloud Computing Playground

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PRESS RELEASES

HP, Intel And Yahoo To Research Cloud Computing

29 July 2008

Sci-Tech Today

Section: News

By: Steve Bosak

A global Cloud Computing Test Bed is planned by industry giants Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Yahoo to test cloud applications. The test beds will be housed in Singapore, Illinois and Germany. HP, Intel and Yahoo hope to develop cloud applications that can harness the Internet and surpass the power of multiple supercomputers.

Industry giants Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Yahoo announced Tuesday a joint project to research large-scale cloud computing, the ability to use applications, servers, storage and other computing services on the Internet without hosting, maintaining or configuring them locally. Early cloud applications include desktop office suites, but have rapidly grown to include enterprisewide services such as storage and network management.

What's in the Cloud?
The three companies will create a Cloud Computing Test Bed that will accommodate global, large-scale applications. The hope is that researchers will be able to test designs, computing and infrastructure requirements and train students and other scientists in the use of cloud computing. The test beds will be hosted in the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany.
Prith Banerjee, senior vice president of research at HP and director of HP Labs, said, "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. 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."

Researchers hope to develop applications that can harness the collective computing power of the Internet, distributing data and applications over many processors and network facilities. In essence, networked applications could surpass the power of multiple supercomputers and have storage capacities that no single institution could manage on its own. Banerjee also suggested cloud applications could become highly predictive and anticipatory, serving data and services to businesses and individuals with little or no initiation on their part, based solely on past usage and locality.

Nuts and Bolts
All three companies will contribute facilities, software and infrastructure resources. HP will provide cloud-enabled ProLiant blade servers and HP POD data-center servers, as well as its Extreme Data Storage System, which can manage multiple petabytes of data. Yahoo will contribute parallel-processing language expertise and open-source distributed software code, while Intel will furnish the latest in core processor technology.

In addition to the three academic research sites, the test bed will include sites at HP, Intel and Yahoo In this massive rollout, each of the six designated research centers will host 1,000 to 4,000 core processors. This enormous commitment of hardware and software is essential for such large-scale experimentation since no one institution could afford nor host so many resources. A similar deployment of distributed computing equipment and software by the U.S. Department of Defense in the 1960s and 70s on a smaller scale created the Internet.