Building crawler engine on cloud computing infrastructure project

Building crawler engine on cloud computing infrastructure use virtual machines on a cloud computing infrastructure to run service engine crawlers and also for application servers. I am taking this project with my batch, we selected this topic fro this IEEE Link: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6215751

If anyone interested to collaborate online for this project, reply here.
Sounds very interesting to me. I would suggest you to setup a CentOS with VMware on it for the base platform.
CentOS and vmware(Linux) are free.
http://partnerweb.vmware.com/GOSIG/CentOS_6.html
http://www.centos.org/
If you need any assistance for this set up, reply me here.

I would also recommend you to share more details about your project plan like, what are the programming languages you use, any software framework etc.

Best of luck for a very successful project.