HP speed and execution has often been compared to an aircraft carrier, but not in this case. HP moves fast with the announcement of the gobal cloud research initiative. Last March I was predicting that HP Labs would move in this direction. Well they did and fast.
This shows me that HP can move fast on their promises and with some sizzle and steak. The partnerships of Intel and Yahoo show some real meat on the bone. I’m not expecting any massive products soon out of this initiative but certainly some innovation.
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.
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.
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.
This has a kind of DARPA feel to it. I have many questions. How will it be organized? What will prevent it from becoming ‘vendorland’ of hidden agendas? How can I as an entrepreneur use it? What is the requirement to participate?
Final question: Where is Google and Microsoft on this?
