HP, Intel and Yahoo! team up for cloud project
August 1, 2008
Hardware company HP is teaming up with chip manufacturers and internet firm Yahoo! to create research centres for cloud computing.
Cloud computing gives online storage and offers a range of new services.
To begin with six data centres will be made available for pre-selected researchers to test out new applications.
The research firm Gartner has said cloud computing is as influential as e-business.
Director of HP’s strategic research lab John Manley said “Cloud computing represents a new era of computing. Working at that kind of scale means there will be many unanswered questions and raise new problems for computer science. We want to create an environment that can begin to answer some of these challenges.”
Cloud computing will offer new ways to use data as well as providing a new way to store the data.
Mr Manley said “The web democratised creativity and allowed anyone to create something new and innovative. Cloud computing is the next stage for that.” He added “To my mind it is the natural evolution of the internet and if we look back in 15 years time we will be astounded by what cloud computing has allowed to happen.”
HP, Intel and Yahoo! will each host one of the centres. The other three centres will be based at the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, the University of Illinois and the Steinbuch Centre for Computing in Germany.
The research will be exploring new applications for cloud computing and looking at the problems of how to make such massive scale computing reliable, secure and manageable.
Each centre will have 1,000 to 4,000 machines to support the research and if needed they can all be connected together.
The research centres will be operational later this year.
Analyst at Gartner David Mitchell Smith believes this is an important point for cloud computing.
He said “Anytime you get three companies of that stature looking to advance it, is significant. We consider cloud computing to be the next really big thing and the sky’s the limit to the services it will enable over the next ten years.”
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