From the Chicago Tribune:
Computer scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are working with colleagues at Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Yahoo, as well as researchers in Europe and Asia, to build a global test bed for exploring system designs for the future.
Cloud computing involves supplying applications over the Internet rather than loading them on an individual user's computer. An example is a word processing program supplied by Google that lets users compose documents without the program on their computers.
...
Cloud computing will go beyond replacing corporate data centers, said Michael Heath, an Illinois computer scientist who is among the leaders building the global cloud test bed.
"We're talking about more than using applications remotely," Heath said. "You won't even have to know about applications or where things happen or what happens. You'll just ask a question and the computer will supply the answer.
"You take the Internet to the next level, where it doesn't just cough up pre-stored data but it creates new knowledge by extracting new information from data."
-- by Jon Van, Chicago Tribune
Read the complete Chicago Tribune article.