The project won the SC08 supercomputing conference's Bandwidth Challenge Award.

"Processing data by clouds today is almost always done within a single datacenter due to the technical challenges processing data across multiple datacenters," a press release announcing the award states. The project "demonstrated technology ... that enables cloud computing to utilize high performance networks and spread cloud computing across datacenters to create wide area clouds."

The Open Cloud Consortium is just getting started, having formed in mid-2008. Grossman says the group is looking at the same technical issues as companies like VMware, which is developing a broad operating system that can manage the entire data center.

The main idea is to gather universities and IT companies in a noncompetitive way to exchange technical information, hopefully leading toward cloud computing that is faster, more secure and based on open standards and open source software.

"I'm not a marketing guy," Grossman says. "This is really trying to understand interoperability issues that I still don't think are clearly understood, and issues about how you operate clouds over wide areas."

Grossman is hoping more major IT vendors will sign on too.

"At this point we're just trying to get a critical mass of vendors to exchange information," he says.

© 2007 Network World Inc.