July 30th, 2008
HP, Intel, Yahoo join NSF, schools for global cloud research
Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Yahoo will join universities and the National Science Foundation to launch a “global collaboration” into researching and experimenting with cloud computing, the companies announced Tuesday.
The group will build a computing network comprised of six data centers on three continents in order to create a large-scale platform for testing cloud technology, including hardware and software.
“This is a global collaboration that spans the industry, spans academia and government,” Prith Banerjee, senior VP for research at HP, told reporters during a teleconference held by the three founding companies.
The universities include the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany.
Each of the founding members will host a cloud-computing infrastructure largely based on HP computers and Intel processors. The infrastructure will include from 1,000 to 4,000 processor cores capable of supporting data-intensive research. The six facilities are up and running today in “bits and pieces” and are expected to be fully operational this year and accessible to researchers worldwide through a selection process.
Specifics: The network will use Apache Hadoop, a software platform for creating distributed applications that process massive amounts of data, and Pig, a Yahoo-created “platform for analyzing large data sets that consists of a high-level language for expressing data analysis programs, coupled with infrastructure for evaluating these programs.”
Yahoo previously worked with Carnegie Mellon to research cloud computing by providing its M45 supercomputing cluster.
