Intel, HP And Yahoo! Team To Advance Cloud Computing

30 July 2008

Enterprise IT Planet

Section: News

By: Pedro Hernandez

HP, Intel and Yahoo! have found a reason to pool some of their tech talents. The three companies revealed that they have teamed to research, and hopefully solve, current technical cloud computing restraints and help usher in "Internet-scale computing."

The research initiative also involves the cooperation of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the National Science Foundation, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany and Singapore's Infocomm Development Authority.

HP and Intel will be bearing the hardware burden of the effort, which will call upon the resources of multiple datacenters located across the globe. Each the six research centers, housed within the facilities of the aforementioned participants, will be outfitted with Intel-powered HP servers. Each of these centers will be dedicating 1,000 to 4,000 processor cores to the cause.

HP will also lend its datacenter expertise, creating an "intelligent infrastructure" to cope with the demands of the cloud and the applications therein. Intel, for its part, will also be furnishing solid state drives (SSDs).

On the software side, the organizations will employ Apache Software's open source distributed computing platform called Hadoop. Yahoo! Research will lend its weight via the open source Pig programming language.

The goal is to create an open source testing platform with a global scale and work out the technical kinks and cost factors that have largely have kept cloud computing the province of tech giants. This includes advancing infrastructure and server management, bolstering the underlying distributed platforms, and guiding application development.

Another goal of the project is to prepare tomorrow's IT workers for the cloud. The test bed is scheduled to go online later this year. A selection process will be instituted for researchers wishing to participate.