Technology giants HP, Yahoo and Intel have announced plans to collaborate on research into how we perceive and use the world wide web.
The companies are partnering with academics in Asia, Europe and the US to create an experimental network that lets researchers test cloud-computing projects and applications.
Their goal is to promote open collaboration among industry, academic and government researchers by removing financial and logistical barriers to working on hugely computer-intensive, internet-wide projects.
Founding members of the consortium said they aim to create a level playing field for individual researchers and companies of all sizes to conduct research on software, network management and the hardware needed to deliver web services on a global scale with the reliability and dependability of a conventional utility service such as a gas supply.
"No one institution or company is going to figure this out," said Prabhakar Raghavan, the head of Yahoo Research who is also a consulting professor of computer science at Stanford University.
Cloud computing the 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 - has become the industry's biggest buzzterm of the moment.
"Potentially the entire planet will come to rely on this, like electricity," Raghavan said.
"We are all trying to move from the horse driving the wagon to a million ants driving the wagon," Raghavan said of the need to let computers manage millions of small jobs, adding that the available capacity on the Web would vary widely. "The challenge can be a billion ants one day and a million ants the next."
Big industry players from Google to Microsoft to IBM all pounced on cloud-computing as a way to create web services on an unprecedented scale.
By contrast, HP, the world's leading PC maker, Intel, the biggest maker of processors, and Yahoo, a web pioneer with some of the biggest audiences for online services, are creating an open network run on data centres from many companies.
"It is an overstatement to say we have a firm grip on all the technical challenges involved," said Intel Research vice president Andrew Chien, adding: "It's not that easy for small innovators to do things" that run reliably across the web.
Chien said Intel's involvement will help it learn how to design its next generation of chips to power ever-larger web tasks but use less energy.
HP, Intel and Yahoo have partnered with the state-run Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - which 15 years ago gave birth to the web browser - and Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. The Illinois partnership also involves the US National Science Foundation.
The test network will consist of data centres run by each of the six initial partners, and be based largely on HP hardware and Intel processors. Machines at each location will dedicate 1,000 to 4,000 processor chips.
