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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.

As we mentioned earlier today, Yahoo! has rolled out Yahoo Search BOSS: the Build your Own Search Service APIs that make much of Yahoo's core content widely available. Though the various offerings involved are not open source, this open content is potentially interesting to open source developers working on the web. Here are some details about what's inside.

Yahoo today announced the beta version of BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service), which essentially turns its core search and other related technologies into a free web service that can be used by anyone who wants to build a search engine. According to Yahoo: Developers, start-ups, and large Internet companies can use BOSS to build and launch web-scale search products that utilize the entire Yahoo! Search index. GigaOm points out that it will allow anyone to rank, arrange and display search results that befit their own algorithm, without as much as acknowledging that the results are coming from Yahoo. Check out more analysis at GigaOm, and an analysis of Yahoo's alpha partners.

Last week, following a report in VentureBeat, we wrote about the rumor that Microsoft was set to acquire natural language search company Powerset for $100 million. Turns out the rumor was true, although the terms of the deal are not disclosed. Powerset gets its semantic search muscle from the open source, cluster-based technology Hadoop. As we've discussed before, Hadoop also powers much of Yahoo's search. It looks like Microsoft's LiveSearch is going to be embracing powerful open source clustered search. This could represent a new chapter in natural language search. Find more analysis on GigaOm.