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HP, Intel and Yahoo are teaming up to create a "global data centre" where businesses, academia and governments can test their online applications, without incurring the huge costs of maintaining their own server infrastructure.

The project provides "a globally distributed, internet-scale testing environment designed to encourage research on the software, data centre management

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and hardware issues associated with cloud computing at a larger scale than ever before."

The test bed will have six centres dotted around the world, including Singapore, Germany and the US. Each centre will have 1,000-4,000 processing cores available, supplied by HP and Intel.

Yahoo is bringing its software expertise to the table, including experience with Apache Hadoop - an open-source distributed computing project - and Pig, Yahoo's own parallel computing language.

"To realise the full potential of cloud computing, the technology industry must think about the cloud as a platform for creating new services and experiences," says Prith Banerjee, senior vice president of research at HP. "This requires an entirely new approach to the way we design, deploy and manage cloud infrastructure and services. The HP, Intel and Yahoo Cloud Computing Test Bed lets us tap the brightest minds in the industry, academia and government to drive innovation in this area."