We (people@HP labs) have known about this for some time, but are told to strictly keep it a secret. HP, Yahoo and Intel research divisions are working together on a huge cloud computing testbed that can be used by researchers in academics and else where. You can read the corporate blurb here.

This has a lot of interesting implications for the business divisions of all three companies. However, I feel that this is a cool thing for research folks. It has always been difficult to do research in data center management in universities, as we don’t have the infrastructure similar to what Google or Amazon has. This initiative goes beyond Planet Lab, EC2, and Emulab, where you are using the resources, rather than researching the management of resources. Once you gain access (hopefully I will soon :-) ), you will be given complete control over the physical machines rather than the containers/virtual machines that you get in Planet Lab and Co.

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