Yahoo!, Tata subsidiary team for cloud research

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 25 March 2008 10:31

Your IT - Home IT

Yahoo! and Computational Research Laboratories (CRL, a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons) are joining forces to support cloud computing research.

CRL's EKA supercomputer is the fourth fastest in the world, and the only one of the top ten that is privately funded and available for use on commercial terms.

The 14,400 processor, 180 teraflop EKA will be made available to Indian academic institutions with Apache Hadoop and other distributed computing software supported by Yahoo!.

"The Tata group has always contributed to scientific research in India, and the EKA will strengthen this cause further in the field of cloud computing. This partnership brings together Yahoo!'s leadership role in the development of Hadoop and CRL's expertise in high performance computing, and will help bridge the gap between traditional supercomputing and cloud computing research in India," said S. Ramadorai, chairman of CRL.

Yahoo! has made its own 4000-processor supercomputer available to researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in recent months.

"Launching our cloud computing program internationally with CRL is another significant milestone in creating a global, collaborative research community working to advance the new sciences of the Internet," said Ron Brachman, Yahoo!'s vice president and head of academic relations.