The Cloud Storm
By Azam on August 1, 2008
The shape of the Cloud is getting more interesting with Intel, HP, Yahoo announcing an initiative in cloud computing. Intel, HP and Yahoo! are creating a global international test bed for cloud computing. The global test bed would function to operate as a multi-data center, open source test bed for the advancement of cloud computing research and education. The initiative is creating an environment based on network designed specifically for cloud computing and allow research and development of services based on advanced architecture for Cloud Services.
The firms will partner with the leading institutions Univ of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in conjunction with NSF, Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany to create a centre of excellence for Cloud computing.
The HP, Intel and Yahoo! Cloud Computing Test Bed will provide 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. The initiative will also support research of cloud applications and services.
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.
“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. This requires an entirely new approach to the way we design, deploy and manage cloud infrastructure and services,” said Prith Banerjee, senior vice president of Research at HP and director of HP Labs. “The HP, Intel and Yahoo! Cloud Computing Test Bed lets us tap the brightest minds in the industry, academia and government to drive innovation in this area.”
Intel is a leading provider of platform technologies, including processors, chipsets, networking and SSD (solid state drives), for cloud computing data centers. Current platform features such as Data Center Management Interface (DCMI), Node Manager (NM) and virtualization have been designed to improve the manageability and energy efficiency of data centers. This open, collaborative research effort will give researchers full access to the system’s hardware for further innovation of existing and future platform features.
“We are pleased to engage with the academic research community — open collaboration with the academia is in our DNA at Intel Research,” said Andrew A. Chien, vice president and director of Intel Research. “Creating large-scale test beds is important because they lower barriers to innovation and provide the opportunity to experiment and learn at scale. Intel’s support of Tashi, an open source cluster management system for cloud computing, and this HP, Intel, Yahoo! Cloud Computing Test Bed are a natural extension of our ongoing, mutually beneficial partnerships with the research community, such as the Universal Parallel Computing Research Centers.”
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.
Categories : TechTags : , Cloud Computing, HP, Infocomm, Intel, KIT, NSF, Univ of IL at Urbana-Champaign, yahoo
[…] The Cloud Storm […]
[…] The Cloud Storm […]