IBM's head in the clouds in Europe

IBM is leading a joint research effort of 13 academic and commercial organizations in Europe to develop "cloud computing" technologies designed to meet demand for IT resources on the fly.

The project, dubbed RESERVOIR -- Resources and Services Virtualization without Barriers -- will focus on enabling service delivery across administrative domains and different hardware and software platforms. Among other things, RESERVOIR could be used to simplify delivery of online entertainment, IBM says.

The initiative follows IBM's launch of its Blue Cloud effort in November . IBM at that time said Blue Cloud would enable “computing across a distributed, globally accessible fabric of resources, rather than on local machines or remote server farms.”

IBM's Haifa Research Lab in Israel leads the RESERVOIR team, which also includes Elsag Datamat, CETIC, OGF.eeig standards organization, SAP Research, Sun Microsystems, Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo, Thales, Umea University, University College of London, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, University of Lugano and University of Messina.

Princeton University recently hosted a two-day seminar on cloud computing 

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