Sunnyvale, California — Yahoo Inc. on Thursday announced that it is expanding its cloud computing research efforts in academia and has made alliances with three more U.S. Universities, including adding new developer tools to its service for building custom search engines, BOSS.
The three new universities being added are: The University of California at Berkley, Cornell University and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst will join Carnegie Mellon University in using Sunnyvale-based Yahoo’s cloud computing cluster to conduct large-scale systems software research and explore new applications that analyze Internet-scale data sets, ranging from voting records to online news sources, the company said in a statement.
The cluster has approximately 4,000 processor-cores and 1.5 petabytes of disks.
Cloud computing is the futures IT development, deployment and delivery model, which enables real-time delivery of products, services and solutions over the Internet.
Carnegie Mellon has been utilizing Yahoo’s M45 cluster for more than a year. These cluster has about 4,000 processor-cores and 1.5 petabytes of disk storage and runs Hadoop, an open-source implementation of the MapReduce programming model for processing large data sets in processor clusters.
“Hadoop powers many of our most broadly used and complex systems at Yahoo!, from Web search to optimizing content for the home page,” said Shelton Shugar, senior vice president of cloud computing at Yahoo!.
“Continuing to invest in the open source community and in technologies like Hadoop is an important element in our efforts to drive breakthroughs in Internet-scale computing and ultimately to continually improve the quality of the consumer experience of Yahoo!. By partnering with these top educational institutions to share our M45 cluster and our technical expertise, we hope to further key insights into the next generation of systems software research and development.”
Yahoo noted that academic researchers so far have had limited access to Internet-scale supercomputers for conducting systems and applications research, and its partnering with more universities will help alleviate the obstacle.
Yahoo officials have pointed out that the company believes academia will play a crucial part in developing the “next generation” of cloud infrastructure and Web applications.
“The power to access and analyze massive data sets is becoming increasingly crucial to the advancement of Internet-related computer science and cross-disciplinary research,” said Ron Brachman, Yahoo’s vice president.
“By expanding our university-facing cloud computing program to partner with more universities, we hope to catalyze data-intensive computing research, furthering our commitment to the global, collaborative research community advancing the new sciences of the Internet,” he added.
In July 2008, Yahoo teamed up with Palo Alto-based Hewlett-Packard, Santa Clara-based Intel Corp., the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Infocomm Development Authority in Singapore, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany to create Open Cirrus, an open source test bed for advancing cloud computing research and education.