Cloud computing research sponsored by Yahoo!

Yahoo! Inc. has announced it was partnering with University of California at Berkeley, Cornell University and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Carnegie Mellon University to advance cloud computing research, also known as M45. 

Yahoo! cloud computing cluster has been operating since November 2007 and has already been in use by Carnegie Mellon. The cluster runs Hadoop, an open source distributed file system and parallel execution environment, and enables users to process vast amounts of data. The cluster has approximately 4,000 processor-cores and 1.5 petabytes of disks.

Jim Kurose, dean of College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, highlighted, the cluster would enable the university to do research on 8.5 books drawn from the Internet Archive’s million-book collection and half a petabyte of scanned books. 

Partnership with the above mentioned universities aligns with partnership that Yahoo! had created with HP, Intel, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) in Singapore, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany aimed at expanding Yahoo!’s leadership in supporting cloud computing research.