I don't have details beyond an announcement that an announcement will happen at 8 a.m. Tuesday.

It says Intel and Yahoo will "announce a joint research initiative tomorrow morning."

Instead of Microsoft, Yahoo's dancing with the Redmond's companies old flames.

It's probably a smart move for Yahoo to hook up with strong research companies that haven't had as much attrition lately.

What could the subject be? Web services for the next generation of mobile computing devices, perhaps?

UPDATE: They announced "the creation of a global, multi-data center, open source test bed for the advancement of cloud computing research and education. The goal of the initiative is to promote open collaboration among industry, academia and governments by removing the financial and logistical barriers to research in data-intensive, Internet-scale computing."

Other partners include the University of Illinois, Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany.

Sounds pretty similar to the Google-IBM project hatched at the UW.

Nice timing by Yahoo - just as Microsoft hosts a bunch of computer science professors to talk about its projects in academia, including new tools released yesterday.

Time for a Live Center of Mesh Computing Excellence somewhere?