On Tuesday, Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Yahoo announced their coming together for working on a project that is to make Web services become dependable, everyday conveniences.

The three companies will be assisted by groups of researchers from Asia, Europe and the US in an attempt to create a new type of network that would enable researchers to experiment with "cloud-computing" projects; such services would eventually be available simultaneously to billions of users worldwide. 

All the participants’ efforts will be put into developing a new, unrestricted collaboration between researchers of various backgrounds (industry, government, academic and so on); the way they plan to go about doing this consists in eliminating any financial and logistical blockages they may encounter, so that in the end, huge Internet projects can be put together.

According to Prabhakar Raghavan, the head of Yahoo Research and also a consulting professor of computer science at Stanford University, the entire planet may one day rely on this technology, just like electricity. He mentioned that any sort of service, ranging from your average call making or instant messaging to shopping or entertainment, would become "always-available, on-demand."

HP, Intel and Yahoo are working alongside Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and the US National Science Foundation.

The test network will be made up of data centers managed by each of the project’s members; the network will be built mainly on technology developed by HP and Intel. The machines from each location are to dedicate 1,000 to 4,000 processor cores; this is what project leaders consider as fit for providing enough power for cloud computing applications.