Hewlett Packard, Intel and Yahoo announced the Cloud Computing Test Bed this morning. Executives from the three companies are holding a 9 am PST conference call to discuss the new venture. Participating are Prith Banerjee, Senior Vice President, Research, HP and Director, HP Labs; Prabhakar Raghavan, Head of Yahoo! Research; and Andrew Chien, Vice President, Corporate Technology Group, Intel and Director, Intel Research.

The product is a distributed computing platform for third party research and application building. My live call notes are below.

Notes, in chronological order:

…waiting for call to begin

Prith Banerjee from HP began the call and introduced Andrew Chien and Prabhakar Raghavan. Summarizing the key news: HP, Intel and Yahoo are partnering with governments and academic institutions to create an open source cloud computing test bed with six distributed centers. Global, distributed, Internet scale platform. The main goal is to remove financial and logistical barriers for people to develop cloud computing application. Partners include the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany.
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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.

Hewlett-Packard is retreating from the digital camera business. It will stop manufacturing its own cameras, and take a $30 million charge to refocus investments on its Print 2.0 strategy, which involves making Web content easier to print and encouraging more printouts. (Remember, HP makes a huge chunk of its money selling ink cartridges). The writing was on the wall on this one. HP’s share of the digital camera market in the U.S. shrank precipitously this year—from 7 percent at the end of 2006 to 4 percent at the end of June, according to the latest figures from IDC. Back in 2001, HP’s market share peaked at 15 percent, ranking it third among all digital camera brands. It now ranks No. 8. This is a typical move for CEO Mark Hurd—cut your losses and move on. (The HP brand could live on, though, licensed to another manufacturer).

Hewlett-Packard wants you to print as many digital photos and other content from the Web as possible. To that end, it bought Boston-based startup Tabblo last spring because of the software it developed to ingest any Web content on one end and spit it out in printable form on the other. Today, Tabblo announced a bunch of deals it’s been working on since it was acquired, including partnerships with Disney, Flickr, Windows Live Space, and the Graffiti Application for Facebook.

With Flickr, for instance, you can use Tabblo to create albums, posters, or photo cubes. (Flickr has a similar deal with Blurb around photo books). Facebook artists proficient at Graffiti, can now print out their creations as posters as well. And 13-year-old fans of Disney pop star Hannah Montana will be able to create concert memento books combining glam shots with their own photos. Tabblo splits the revenues from the $30 books or other printed products with its partners. If you print it yourself, it’s free (but HP still wins if you use an HP printer).