HP, Intel and Yahoo announced this week that they will all be working together and have started a global, multi-data center, open source test bed for the advancement of cloud computing. The goal for the test bed program is to promote open collaboration among industry, academia, and governments.

The test bed devised by the three companies will provide a globally distributed, Internet-scale testing environment designed to encourage research on software, hardware issues and data center management. The three firms have collaborated with the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) of Singapore, the University of Illinois, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany.

The test bed includes six "centers of excellence" located at the partner facilities. Each location uses Intel processors and will have 1,000 to 4,000 processor cores that can support the intense workload associated with cloud computing.

Via HP