MANILA, Philippines -- Three technology stalwarts plan to build a global network of data centers to encourage research and application development around Web-based computing.

The goal of the initiative is to promote open collaboration among industry, academe and governments “by removing the financial and logistical barriers to research in data-intensive, Internet-scale computing,” according to a joint statement from the three companies.

The initiative will create “centers of excellence” at the University of Illinois in the United States, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany and a dedicated facility in partnership with Singapore's Infocomm Development Authority.

HP Labs, Intel Research and Yahoo will likewise each have data center facilities that will support research and development.

Each location will host a cloud computing infrastructure, largely based on HP hardware and Intel processors, and will have 1,000 to 4,000 processor cores capable of supporting the data-intensive research associated with cloud computing.

The test bed locations are expected to be fully operational and made accessible to researchers worldwide through a selection process later this year.

This initiative, meanwhile, will leverage on Yahoo's open source projects by running Apache Hadoop -- an open source, distributed computing project of the Apache Software Foundation -- and other open source, distributed computing software.

“With this test bed, not only can researchers test applications at Internet scale, they will also have access to the underlying computing systems to advance understanding of how systems software and hardware function in a cloud environment,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Research.

Yahoo announced last November the deployment of a supercomputing-class data center, called M45, for cloud computing research. Carnegie Mellon University was the first to use Yahoo’s supercomputer.

HP Labs, the central research arm of HP, meanwhile, will use the test bed to conduct advanced research in the areas of intelligent infrastructure and dynamic cloud services.