HP, Intel, Yahoo team up on the cloud

HP, Intel and Yahoo on Sunday announced three new research organizations will join their Open Cirrus joint effort, a global open-source testbed for the advancement of cloud-computing research.

The continued effort marks increased collaboration between the tech giants for cloud computing.

The new organizations--the Russian Academy of Sciences; South Korea's Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute; and Mimos, a strategic research and development organization under the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation in Malaysia--were revealed Wednesday at the group's first Open Cirrus Summit.

Launched in July 2008, the Open Cirrus cloud-computing testbed was created to promote open collaboration among the industry, academia and governments by removing the financial and logistical barriers to research in data-intensive, internet-scale computing.

Open Cirrus simulates a real-life, global, Internet-scale environment and gives researchers the ability to test applications and measure the performance of infrastructure and services built to run on large-scale cloud systems.

The testbed has more than 50 research projects currently underway.

Expansion of the Open Cirrus community means researchers will have access to new approaches and skill sets to better realize the full potential of cloud computing. The new institutes will also host additional test-bed research sites, expanding the global footprint of Open Cirrus to nine locations, making it the most geographically diverse cloud-computing testbed available to researchers.

The new sites will contribute tools and best practices, and will help further benchmark and compare alternative approaches to service management at data center scale.

The Russian Academy of Sciences, the first Eastern European institution to join Open Cirrus, encompasses three bodies:

• The Institute for System Programming (ISP), which will conduct fundamental scientific research and applications in the field of system programming
• The Joint SuperComputer Center (JSCC), which will engage in the processing of large arrays of biological data, nanotechnology, 3D modeling and other applications, and port them to cloud infrastructure
• The Russian Research Center Kurchatov Institute, which will explore how cloud computing is different from other technologies, and apply its techniques for large-scale data processing

South Korea's Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute plans to conduct research and development on the management architecture and content retrieval of massive data sets.

Mimos will develop a national cloud-computing platform to deploy services throughout Malaysia, focusing on enabling services through software, security frameworks and mobile interactivity, as well as testing new cloud tools and methodologies.

This article was first published as a blog post on ZDNet.