Three of the biggest names in the tech world are joining forces in a new cloud computing initiative.

HP, Yahoo and Intel will combine their efforts to build a huge cloud system which will be used by university and government researchers to develop methods of constructing, managing and developing large-scale platforms.

Along with the Singapore Infocomm Development Authority, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, the companies will construct a cloud computing system which will contain tens of thousands of processing cores.

Each of the six groups will be responsible for maintaining a section of the system ranging from 1,000 to 4,000 cores. The entire system will run on Yahoo's deployment of Apache Hadoop.

"This is a global collaboration that spans the industry, academia and government, and will bring together the brightest researchers from around the world," said Prith Banerjee, HP's senior vice president of research and director of HP Labs.

The aim of the project is to allow students and researchers the opportunity to work with a large-scale system.

Training students on development for cloud computing has presented a problem for universities, which lack the huge computing power needed to simulate a cloud environment.

Other tech companies have sponsored similar cloud projects in the hope of creating graduates capable of working with cloud systems.

IBM and Google maintain a cloud programme which works with several universities in the US to offer development instruction.

Intel, HP and Yahoo, however, hope to create an even deeper experience for students and researchers.

Intel research director Andrew Chien told reporters that the new project will also study the maintenance and construction of cloud systems.

"The Google/IBM research is focused on the application level," he said. "I think there's a greater breadth of space that can be explored in this test bed. "