A new research centre for cloud computing initiatives has just been announced by Yahoo, Hewlett Packard and Intel. The center will create “a global, multi-data center, open source test bed for the advancement of cloud computing research and education. The goal of the initiative is to promote open collaboration among industry, academia and governments by removing the financial and logistical barriers to research in data-intensive, Internet-scale computing.”

At CETIS we have started our first venture into cloud computing with our content packaging transcoder service. It will be interesting to see if any upcoming JISC projects and the eFramework will be able to utilise the new services announced by Yahoo et al.

More coverage of the announcement is available from Techcrunch including a live blog from a conference call about the announcement, and the BBC.