Intel, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard are teaming up to create six open-source labs to research “cloud computing”,  software applications accessed through a Web browser.

The companies said the labs located in Singapore, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, will each have 1,000 to 4,000 processor cores capable of supporting the data-intensive research associated with cloud computing. The labs are expected to be operational and available to researchers worldwide later this year.

“With this test bed, not only can researchers test applications at Internet scale, they will also have access to the underlying computing systems to advance understanding of how systems software and hardware function in a cloud environment,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo research.

Cloud computing, which is software is run at remote data centers and then accessed over a web browser, has often been cited as the next step in the Internet economy. Major players in the field so far include Google,  which has an array of cloud offerings including word processing and spreadsheet programs.