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Internet giant Yahoo is teaming up with Chip giant Intel and hardware company HP to create virtual research centers for cloud computing.

In a joint press release, the companies said they would create a “test bed” of six data centers designed to promote open-source collaboration around intensive cloud computing. The array will allow companies, academics and other institutions to conduct cloud-computing experiments on a global scale, removing the financial and logistical barriers to research in Internet-scale computing.

Although cloud computing is still relatively new, large-scale, distributed computing environments are regularly used for such data-intensive tasks as predicting climate change or analyzing risk, according to HP.

Cloud computing has become the industry's biggest buzzword. It is a catch-all term to describe how Internet-connected hardware and software once delivered as discreet products can be managed as Web-based, utility-like services.

Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Research, summed up the effort thusly: “With this test bed, not only can researchers test applications at Internet scale, they will also have access to the underlying computing systems to advance understanding of how systems software and hardware function in a cloud environment.”

Initial testing will be conducted at six sites: The Infocomm Development Authority in Singapore; The University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign; Karlsruhe University in Karlsruhe, Germany; and facilities at HP Labs, Intel Research and Yahoo. More centers will be added in the future.

The test network will consist of data centers run by each of the six initial partners, and be based largely on HP hardware, Intel microprocessors and run Yahoo's Apache Hadoop, an open source platform that lets users write and run applications that process vast amounts of data. Machines at each location will dedicate 1,000 to 4,000 processor chips.