After dragging its feet, Hewlett-Packard is stepping up with an answer to cloud computing by inking a partnership with Intel, Yahoo and three universities to create a cloud computing testbed. The cloud will comprise six physical locations where mostly HP servers containing between 1,000 and 4,000 mostly Intel cores will run Apache Hadoop. Hadoop is the open source infrastructure for taking advantage of huge clusters of computers to produce fast results for queries. It's behind much of Yahoo's search, as we covered here. Today, GigaOm offers complete analysis. Check it out.