OCC members include the University of Illinois, Northwestern University, Johns Hopkins, the University of Chicago, and the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). Cisco is the first major IT vendor to publicly join the OCC, though more could be on the way.

The consortium's key infrastructure is the Open Cloud Testbed, a testbed consisting of two racks in Chicago, one at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and one at Calit2 in La Jolla, all joined with 10 Gigabit Ethernet connections.

Grossman and colleagues recently used the testbed to measure the performance penalty when doing computation over wide areas. Grossman says by using Sector and Sphere, open source software developed by the National Center for Data Mining for use in storage and compute clouds, they were able to transport data about twice as fast as Hadoop, an Apache Software Foundation project. One of several reasons for the speed improvement is the use of the UDT protocol, which is designed for extremely high speed networks and large data sets. Most cloud services use , Grossman says.

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."