“In a bid to push the technology to new heights, three of the biggest names in the tech world are joining forces to develop massive cloud computing testing facilities.”
San Francisco — Three tech giants — Yahoo Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co. and Intel Corp. — in a joint announcement on Tuesday said they embarking on a joint research project focused on cloud computing, an approach that already is starting to reshape IT and is leading to development of some of the world’s largest data centers into reliable, everyday utilities.The group’s new Cloud Computing Test Bed is aimed at creating a large, globally distributed testing environment that they hope will encourage unprecedented levels of research.
Earlier this year Google and IBM teamed up for the same purpose, to advance research into providing software as a service on the Internet hosted by data centers instead of requiring people to install programs on their computers.
The companies are joining forces with academic researchers in Asia, Europe and the United States to create an experimental network that lets researchers test “cloud-computing” projects — Web-wide services that can reach billions of users at once.
“Cloud computing is of critical importance to the industry,” Intel Research director Andrew Chien said during a conference call with reporters.
“We really see this as a big challenge not only in terms of services provided from the cloud but technological challenges about what the shape of cloud computing should be.”
Companies from Amazon to Google, IBM and Salesforce.com already offer some cloud computing services, but Prith Banerjee, senior vice president of research at HP and director of HP Labs, said a larger effort is needed.
“It requires an entirely new approach to the way we manage, and deploy cloud computing,” he said in a conference call with reporters.
Banerjee also said the participation of HP Labs fit with the group’s renewed commitment to focus more on projects that have a clear commercial payoff.
Along with the Singapore Infocomm Development Authority, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, the companies will construct a massive cloud computing system which will contain tens of thousands of processing cores.
Each of the six groups will be responsible for maintaining a section of the system ranging from 1,000 to 4,000 cores. The entire system will run on Yahoo’s deployment of Apache Hadoop.
“This is a global collaboration that spans the industry, academia, and government, and will essentially bring the brightest researchers from around the world,” declared Banerjee.
Their aim is to encourage open collaboration among industry, academic and government researchers by removing financial and logistical barriers to working on hugely computer-intensive, Internet-wide projects.
Founding members of the association said they intend to create a level playing field for individual researchers and organizations of all sizes to conduct research on software, network management and the hardware needed to deliver Web-wide services as billions of computer and phone users come online.
“No one institution or company is going to figure this out,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, the head of Yahoo Research who is also a consulting professor of computer science at nearby Stanford University.
A common example of cloud computing is web-based email offered by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and other Internet operations. Google has expanded its online software offerings to include word documents, spread sheets and more.
“To realize the full potential of cloud computing, the technology industry must think about the cloud as a platform for creating new services and experiences,” said Banerjee.
The latest research effort may turn out to be the point of a spear that spurs a more concerted commercial push into cloud computing technologies by IT vendors. The cloud approach, which relies on an Internet-based architecture that is both scalable and flexible, can be used for internal, inside-the-firewall applications or to support computing services for external users.
The U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency, the Pentagon’s IT arm, is among the users that are adopting the cloud model for internal uses. But the real attention thus far has been on Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp., which are both building massive data centers that will use cloud architectures to deliver online services to businesses and home users.
HP, Intel and Yahoo hope that by banding together, they can foster increased collaboration among IT vendors, universities and government agencies on cloud computing, which they said is being hampered by “financial and logistical barriers.”
The three companies, which are not disclosing their planned financial investments in the initiative, believe that the academic research community needs access to larger systems if it is going to participate in cloud computing development efforts.
“Universities do not have the equipment to conduct deep research at Internet scale,” said Raghavan. And, Raghavan said, developing the next generation of Web-based services “will demand collaborative research,” with academic institutions helping companies such as Yahoo to “create applications on truly large-scale computing systems.”
“Potentially the entire planet will come to rely on this, like electricity,” Raghavan added, referring to the push to make everything from daily communications to shopping to entertainment into always-available, on-demand Web services.
“We are all trying to move from the horse driving the wagon to a million ants driving the wagon,” Raghavan said of the need to let computers manage millions of small jobs, adding that the available capacity on the Web would vary widely. “The challenge can be a billion ants one day and a million ants the next.”
Details can be found at research.yahoo.com/cloud.