Microsoft, Google and Sun Microsystems are teaming up with researchers at the University of California, Berkeley to launch a new Internet research lab on the campus.

The three companies will provide $7.5m, over five years to fund research at the Reliable, Adaptive and Distributed systems lab (RAD), UC Berkeley researchers announced on Thursday.

"Our goal is to create technology that will enable individual inventors and entrepreneurs to provide new services of value similar to large Internet services people use every day," said David Patterson, UC Berkeley professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences and founding director of the RAD Lab.

"The companies benefit by witnessing ideas in pre-competitive technologies at the early stages of development, and they will help point out the real-world obstacles that must be overcome."

David Patterson: "Our goal is to create technology that will enable individual inventors and entrepreneurs to provide new services of value similar to large Internet services people use every day."

RAD Lab researchers will focus on developing alternatives to traditional software engineering, which follows a "waterfall" model of development. In such a traditional system, work is completed in orderly stages starting from system concept to development, assessment or testing, deployment and operation.

Critics say the traditional waterfall model is often too slow and therefore obsolete for the high-paced Internet era. Instead of infrequent, well-tested upgrades, code for Internet services is continually being modified on the fly as the product is scaled up to accommodate millions of users.

This fix-it-as-you-go feedback loop enables speedier deployment, but it also requires a large technical support staff to make sure operations are not disrupted as bugs are resolved.

Google, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems are considered foundation members of the RAD Lab, each donating to it an average of $500,000 per year. Along with additional smaller contributions from other affiliated companies, the research lab is expected to receive as much as 80 per cent of its support from industry.

Grants from the National Science Foundation and the UC Discovery and the Microelectronics Innovation and Computer Research Opportunities (MICRO) programs will make up the remaining proportion of the funding for the center.

The researchers emphasized that any software and applications emerging from the RAD Lab will be made freely and openly available to the public, with source code distributed using the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) license.

The founders emphasized that making this research as widely and openly available as possible will maximize the impact of the work, and so further the reputation of the university in its mission to create new industries and new jobs.