Yahoo, Intel and Hewlett Packard have joined hands with three universities for a cloud computing effort called the Cloud Computing TestBed (CCBT). The object of creating CCBT is to create a platform for allied academic institutions and industry players to design, build and test applications written for cloud infrastructure - from low-level OS, network technologies, storage and user-facing output.

The three universities collaborating in this venture - Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Steinbuch Centre for Computing of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany - are attempting to build six "center of excellence" data centers with each farming about 1000 to 4000 processor cores. The data centers designed will promote arrays of open-source collaborations amongst companies, academics and other institutions for cloud-computing related development ventures on a global scale.

The CCBT is said to compete against Google's cloud computing efforts and collaboration with IBM for promoting development of Internet-scale applications in universities.

Prith Banerjee, Senior Vice President of HP Research and HP Labs director, said, "Unlike other partnerships including Google and IBM's where the lower-level stacks are not provided in an open manner to the world, we want open access to all levels of the hardware. The Google approach is a proprietary way of building the hardware, and essentially all you see is the software layer at the top."

Initially, Yahoo will provide open source software such as Apache Hadoop and Pig (high level programming language for massively parallel processing) while Intel and HP back the effort with hardware support.

Two weeks back Amazon's scalable and robust S3 servers faced service outrage and Amazon shared details for the downtime. Taking a lesson from this outage, Microsoft has rolled up its sleeves and is working with cloud computing technology to produce a tool set for developers to create scalable programs functional on a single server like those functional at data centers.

The CCBT as platform will aid researchers and IT industry players to test Internet-scalability of their application and also make use of computing systems in the cloud computing stack. In spite of the current hysteria, many still feel that Cloud Computing as a concept still remains a myth.

This initiative sounds a little too much like a publicity story.

If this is for real, there are far too many questions unanswered: IP ownership since it uses open source software, privacy of the researchers and developers, security of data and programming code, reliability on services, and most importantly, documentation, tutorials, support and bank of APIs to collate with cloud computing infrastructure.

If this is yet another rivalry battle, not everyone might be interested.