Threesome get into test bed

THREE OF THE BIGGEST PLAYERS in computing technology have announced the creation of a global Open Source test bed for the advancement of cloud computing. The three industry heavyweights Hewlett Packard, Intel and Yahoo, hope the intiative will "remove the financial and logistical barriers" currently plaguing research efforts in data-intensive, internet-scale computing.

Six centers, each featuring 1,000 to 4,000 Intel processor cores, are slated to host the cloud computing infrastructure. The test bed will be powered by Apache Hadoop and other Open Source software such as Pig, a parallel programming language developed by Yahoo Research.

According to Prith Banerjee, senior vice president of research at HP and director of HP Labs, "The technology industry must think about the cloud as a platform for creating new services and experiences."

Andrew A Chien, vice president and director of Intel Research, concurred. “Creating large-scale test beds is important because they lower barriers to innovation and provide the opportunity to experiment and learn at scale."

Other partners in the initiative include Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the National Science Foundation and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany.

L'Inq
Yahooodeedoodeeedoo