Intel, Yahoo, HP Team With Researchers On Cloud Computing

Working in IT means that you've inevitable heard someone, somewhere talk about the cloud and the benefits it can have for computing and business in general. A lot of people just roll their eyes when they hear it mentioned, but HP, Intel and Yahoo -- along with a coalition of academics from Europe, Asia and the United States -- are looking to give the cloud teeth. The goal of Intel, HP, Yahoo, the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and a few government agencies is to turn the Web into a reliable utility.

The members of the consortium laid out their goals simply: they want to create a level playing field for researches that use the Web to do work on software, network management and hardware to deliver Web-wide services, according to Reuters.

Prabhakar Raghavan, the head of Yahoo Research who is also a consulting professor of computer science at Stanford, is hoping the joint research will push the Web to offer 24-hour 7-days a week services that users can use at anytime.

"Potentially the entire planet will come to rely on this, like electricity," Raghavan told Reuters.

But Raghavan also believes that there is no way that a single institution or company will be able to perform all the research that needs to be in order for his vision of cloud computing to take off.

"We are all trying to move from the horse driving the wagon to a million ants driving the wagon," said Raghavan. "The challenge can be a billion ants one day and a million ants the next."

HP, Intel and Yahoo believe that the only way to make cloud computing and always available Web services a reality is to open up the research to as many people as possible. Creating a utility that runs reliably across the Web is a tough job for a single research or institution that may not have the resources necessary to carry an idea all the way to fruition. But by opening the research up to anyone who is interested, deficiencies can be overcome.

"It is an overstatement to say we have a firm grip on all the technical challenges involved," Intel Research vice president Andrew Chien told Reuters.

HP, Intel and Yahoo have partnered with the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Reuters reports.

The first network test centers will be run primarily by HP hardware and Intel chipsets. Each of the six partners will run a data center and dedicate between 1,000 and 4,000 processor chips at each location.