Cloud computing certainly is all the buzz these days. Case in point, HP, Intel, and Yahoo! have announced a new initiative called the Cloud Computing Test Bed. This “Test Bed” is a “multi-data center, open source test bed for the advancement of cloud computing research and education.” The three corporations have partnered with Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (and the NSF here), and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany to form the research initiative.

This test bed will initially consist of six data centers or what the companies are calling “centers of excellence.”. They will be located at IDA facilities, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagn, the Steinbuch Centre for Computing of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, HP Labs, Intel Research and Yahoo! and they will each have between 1000 to 4000 processor cores on hand for data-intensive research associated with cloud-computing. Powering the clouds will be Apache Hadoop and programming languages such as Pig (which was developed by Yahoo! Research).

The promise of cloud computing is certainly out there – the real question now is – what problems are best solved by cloud computing. Certainly large data driven problems are best candidates since they can be broken up in many different pieces and then distributed across many processor cores. Everything from data mining projects, to astronomy related number crunching to cancer research could potentially capitalize on cloud computing.

Yet everyday chores can also benefit from cloud computing. Cloud computing as Prith Banerjee, senior vice president of Research at HP says, is a “platform for creating new services and experiences.” Indeed – if you treat the cloud as a platform, you can build all sorts of nifty solutions on top of it with the guarantee (or perhaps hope) that the platform will provide the necessary resources in terms of processing power or storage capacity to back it up. Consider Microsoft’s own recent foray into this with the Live Mesh program. No one actually knows how much processing power is behind the Mesh – and no one cares – as long as it’s up and running and provides the necessary oomph to power applications on the net.

In an increasingly connected world, cloud computing promises to deliver services round the clock no matter where you are in the world.. OK.. that’s still a bit “pie in the sky” but it’s a cool thought isn’t it?

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