HP, Intel and Yahoo! have set the basis of an organization whose purpose is that of creating a global testing environment to promote academic and entrepreneurial research in the field of cloud computing. The test bed will ideally reach a global scale but, for now, only six "centers of excellence," as they were named, will be created. The six include, besides the laboratories of the three founders, the IDA facilities, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Steinbuch Centre for Computing of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.

The hardware infrastructure will be provided by HP and Intel, while Yahoo! will see to the software development, through its two open source technologies, Apache Hadoop and Pig, a parallel programming language.

"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." said Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo! Research, underscoring the outlook of the project. People, but also organizations, will come to benefit from the test bed initiated by the three companies.

The cloud computing data center will be the ace-up-the-sleeve for HP's own initiative, Everything as a Service. This vision of the company came into being based on the idea of creating an environment where cloud computing would help people and businesses by anticipating their needs, "based on location, preferences, calendar and communities".

"Creating large-scale test beds is important because they lower barriers to innovation and provide the opportunity to experiment and learn at scale." said Andrew A. Chien, vice president and director of Intel Research. This is the second initiative this week that aims at globalizing technology. The New Open Web Foundation, also developed with considerable contribution from electronic and IT companies, aims to ratify web standards and to create an open source database to be used by everyone.