Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Yahoo are partnering for cloud computing research and education in order to advance the development and adoption of large-scale, data-intensive Internet-hosted applications and related IT infrastructure.

By banding together, the trio of computer industry titans hopes to foster collaboration among vendors, universities and government agencies around cloud computing, whose progress is hampered by "financial and logistical barriers," the companies said Tuesday.

Intel, Yahoo and HP are forming the Cloud Computing Test Bed, which they describe as a global, multi-data center, open-source effort designed to promote research on software, data center management and hardware for large-scale, Internet-hosted computing.

Partners in the initiative include the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the National Science Foundation and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany

These partners, HP Labs, Intel Research and Yahoo will host six "centers of excellence," each of which will have a cloud computing infrastructure mostly based on HP hardware and Intel processors. The centers will have 1,000 to 4,000 processor cores and are expected to be up and running later this year for selected researchers from around the globe.

The centers will run the open source, distributed computing Apache Hadoop project from the Apache Software Foundation and other open source, distributed computing software such as Pig, a parallel programming language developed by Yahoo Research.

In a reorganization announced in June, Yahoo announced the creation of a Cloud Computing & Data Infrastructure Group.

Meanwhile, HP Labs will use the centers to do research on "intelligent infrastructure and dynamic cloud services," an area the company has identified as a priority, the companies said.

Intel researchers will in turn focus on extending the company's knowledge and development of processors, chipsets and other technologies for cloud computing data centers.

The companies will hold a press conference at noon U.S. Eastern Time to discuss the announcement.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.