The mystery announcement we mentioned yesterday was just released - Yahoo, Hewlett Packard and Intel are jointly announcing a new cloud computing research initiative called the Cloud Computing Test Bed. Users will be able to build and launch new applications on the platform.
It’s being described as “a globally distributed, Internet-scale testing environment designed to encourage research on the software, data center management and hardware issues associated with cloud computing at a larger scale than ever before.” Other partners include the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) (which is distinct from the MDA, I believe, which is unfortunate), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany:
The test bed will initially consist of six “centers of excellence” at IDA facilities, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Steinbuch Centre for Computing of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, HP Labs, Intel Research and Yahoo!. Each location will host a cloud computing infrastructure, largely based on HP hardware and Intel processors, and will have 1,000 to 4,000 processor cores capable of supporting the data-intensive research associated with cloud computing. The test bed locations are expected to be fully operational and made accessible to researchers worldwide through a selection process later this year.
The test bed will leverage Yahoo!’s technical leadership in open source projects by running Apache Hadoop — an open source, distributed computing project of the Apache Software Foundation — and other open source, distributed computing software such as Pig, the parallel programming language developed by Yahoo! Research.
“The HP, Intel and Yahoo! Cloud Computing Test Bed furthers our commitment to the global, collaborative research community that is advancing the new sciences of the Internet,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo! Research. “With this test bed, not only can researchers test applications at Internet scale, they will also have access to the underlying computing systems to advance understanding of how systems software and hardware function in a cloud environment.”
Researchers at HP Labs, the central research arm of HP, will use the test bed to conduct advanced research in the areas of intelligent infrastructure and dynamic cloud services. HP Labs recently sharpened its focus to help HP and its customers capitalize on the industry’s shift toward cloud computing, a driving force behind HP’s vision of Everything as a Service. With Everything as a Service, devices and services will interact seamlessly through the cloud, and businesses and individuals will use services that anticipate their needs based on location, preferences, calendar and communities.
More on Yahoo, HP and Intel’s websites. This gets Yahoo in the game that Microsoft, Amazon and Google have been playing for some time.
See I knew it!
Michael , told Jason yestearday the news isn’t like it’s a big deal or we at least haven’t seen it. You should see the servers they are build for it ( my ex-boss revealed to me)
Would be awesome if the cloud names itself SkyNet later on
This is an important step forward in my opinion. We need more cloud-based architectures to break. Clearly we are pushing Amazon’s cloud with sites like Twitter, Smugmug, 37 Signals, and other socially driven apps/sites/services that rely exclusively on the cloud-based model.
Google App Engine holds promise, but doesn’t fully support all the programming languages that Amazon does *yet*. This new partnership could be just what we need to build the next generation of cloud-based socnet apps.
Where do I sign up to get on the list? I’ve got a couple engines that I want to build and deploy in the cloud. I’m still not 100% convinced that the Yahoo-HP-Intel cloud will be any different, but time will tell.
I see this as a very important move for Yahoo, getting some VERY big names on their side. Kudos to the Yahoo! folks for pushing this initiative forward while dealing with the chaotic and distracting M&A madness.
Between MS, Amazon, and now this, is there any room left for the small players?
Sounds like grid computing. So who gets the t-shirt?
Yes Grid is very close, too bad I already spend $100 they provided me to test their feature. Hope ill get same chance to do the same with this so called “new service”
Y! continues to surprise the world.. nice!
Posts like these remind me of the good ‘ol days when TC was a niche site focused on VC funding and the little guys, and MA would get in trouble for something like this. Since this is now basically a wire feed for verbatum press out of big and connected companies, the countdown begins for the launch of “CrunchWire”… How much will the submission fee be?
big deal! yahoo doesn’t have a strategy so they just keep putting things out there hoping something sticks!
Yeah, Y! already announced a service like this, but without any details. I guess they got other companies to partner with to give some legitimacy.
I vote “cloud” to the the most obnoxious, overhyped word of 2008. It’s already almost as bad as “web 2.0″.
Got my vote.
I thought Sun Microsystems also have a cloud (cannot remember what it was called - listened to Tom McNealy when he was here). We use Amazon which allowed us to launch at low cost but it also introduced a significant headache in terms of exchange between three systems which we could have done without at such an early stage.
Sun’s answer, if I recall rightly, is Project Caroline.
Personally, while it is interesting that the larger industry players are getting into the game, the phases of the projects (very early/alpha) or the target (researchers) make it a bit less interesting commercially.
While not perfect, EC2/S3 are already out there and being used.
So is this more than bunch of people supporting hadoop?
Right now, “cloud computing” means different things to different people. I’m really trying to see what exactly is newsworthy in this announcement. For example, take this quote from HP Labs, ” With Everything as a Service, devices and services will interact seamlessly through the cloud, and businesses and individuals will use services that anticipate their needs based on location, preferences, calendar and communities.”
What’s the big deal? What is in this statement that cannot already be accomplished using standard web protocols, web services and XML.? At the end of the day, users will access EaaS via http, perform processing using web services, and render the returned XML data in http.
I don’t see the connection between what HP Labs is talking about and what my take on what cloud computing is (remember, I said it means different things to different people). I see cloud computing as more than just another way to “virtualize” infrastructure. I look at it more as a way to implement multiprocessing on a more macro level, and then to levarage that capability by making it accessible via web services, http, etc. Just my $0.02
Count it!
Got it right too. Aren’t we so smart?
J, http://www.sumolabs.com
Maybe they’ll create a “cloud spellcheck” so the third word in the story (and hyperlinked no less) isn’t misspelled.
Excellent move for Y! in particular
At Enomaly, we’ve been working with Intel for the last 18 months on several “cloud” projects and our reoccurring problem has been how do you test a cloud platform designed to manage upwards of 100,000 servers without access to a real world test bed. This is a good first step, but with less then 1000 servers it still doesn’t adequately address the problem., but it is a good start.
Did anyone correctly guess this yesterday?
There were a lot of guesses someone probably did.
http://blabtech.blogspot.com
Cloud Computing Test Bed will for sure, be very helpful to a lot of internet users out there. It’s indeed an innovation. And it’s not just it. It’s been supported by three giant companies! How’s that!?
In your Crunchbase link for HP - that should be GartNer, not Garter
The 3 “Kings” of cloud computing are
Google
?
?
Thanks guys!!!
Salesforce
(Force.com Paas)
1. Google
2. Akamai
3. VMware
The 3 “Kings” of cloud computing are
Google
SAVVIS
?
Amazon is the “King” of cloud computing
So, who are the three Kings of Cloud computing?
Google, SAVVIS?, and ???
VOYT
By Dan D. Gutierrez
CEO of HostedDatabase.com
We’re a good example of the staying power of cloud vendors. We launched the web’s first Database-as-a-Service offering way back in 1999. This was a time when the cloud was dark and ill-defined. Fast forward nearly 10 years, and we’re seeing white with sunshine. The time for the cloud has finally come.