Leaders collaborate in the cloud

The partners say the test bed approach will provide a globally distributed internet scale testing environment designed to encourage research on the software, data centre management and hardware issues associated with cloud computing at a larger scale than ever before. The initiative will also support research of cloud applications and services. "To realise the full potential of cloud computing," said Prith Banerjee, pictured, director of HP Labs, "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 Test Bed lets us tap the brightest minds in the industry, academia and government to drive innovation in this area." The test bed will initially consist of six 'centres of excellence'. Each will host a cloud computing infrastructure, largely based on HP hardware and Intel processors, with between 1000 and 4000 processor cores available to support data intensive research.