..::Intel Computers,Processors,Mother boards::..

Seeking to avoid being left behind, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Yahoo announced Tuesday their joint project, The HP, Intel, and Yahoo Cloud Computing Test Bed. That is exactly what it is, an open-source project with data centers around the globe to enable large-scale research of cloud computing.

There will be initially six data centers with HP servers powered by Intel processors, each with 1,000 to 4,000 processor cores. As one server usually has eight cores nowadays (dual Xeon quadcore), it means that each center will host 125 to 500 servers. The six locations will be one at each of Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Yahoo, and at the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, the University of Illinois, and the Steinbuch Centre for Computing in Germany. The National Science Foundation will also be involved as part of the work being done at the University of Illinois, the companies said.

The three companies will also allow pre-selected researchers to test new applications. The servers will run open-source software such as the Apache Software Foundation's Apache Hadoop distributed computing technology and Pig, a parallel programming language developed by Yahoo's research and development unit.

What this means is HP and Intel will use their hardware muscles, whereas Yahoo will be essential in contributing its expertise. Prith Banerjee, senior vice president of Research at HP and director of HP Labs, said in the joint statement that The HP, Intel and Yahoo! Cloud Computing Test Bed will allow tapping the brightest minds in the industry, academia and government to drive innovation in the field of cloud computing.

All three companies have shown interest in cloud computing before. In June, Yahoo announced the creation of a Cloud Computing & Data Infrastructure Group. Intel Research previously unfolded a cloud computing project, called the Universal Parallel Computing Research Centers. HP, earlier this year, announced the formation of its Scalable Computing & Infrastructure Organization (SCI), which includes a dedicated set of resources that provide expertise and spearhead development efforts to build scalable solutions designed for high-performance and cloud computing customers.

IBM is another major player in cloud computing. Last October, Google and IBM announced a joint investment of about $20-25 million in what is known as “cloud computing”, a type of data center that uses parallel computing and virtualization to maximize computing power per server.

Google’s partnership with IBM includes the acquisition of the hardware, the software and the services needed for the cloud-computing initiative. The project started with a data center of only 400 computers, but the two companies’ CEOs have pledged the extension of the “cloud” to more than 4,000, scattered in different locations.

IBM also produces a series of cloud computing solutions for corporate data centers. The solutions family, dubbed "Blue Cloud," enable large pools of systems that are linked together to provide various IT services. Blue Cloud includes support for systems with Power and x86 processors and is managed by IBM Tivoli software which manages multiple servers to ensure optimal performance based on demand.