Yesterday, Yahoo, Hewlett-Packard, and Intel announced they are partnering with three universities and their governments in United States, Germany, and Singapore to build a new cloud-computing research initiative. Google and IBM launched a similar program last fall, which centered around six American universities. (Microsoft and Intel also launched a different university research partnership earlier this year.)
The new program will provide researchers with six test-bed data centers (one at each of the university and industry partners), each furnished with between 1,000 and 4,000 processors. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will represent American academia in the partnership, and will be supported in part by the NSF.
As the New York Times’ Steve Lohr points out, “This is competition at its best.”