Thursday, 27 March 2008

Yahoo! & Computational Research Labs to Collaborate on Cloud Computing Study

Internet behemoth Yahoo! and Computational Research Laboratories (CRL), a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons Limited, said Monday that they have decided to jointly support cloud computing research...

Internet behemoth Yahoo! and Computational Research Laboratories (CRL), a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons Limited, said Monday that they have decided to jointly support cloud computing research.

As part of the agreement, CRL will make available to researchers one of the world’s top five supercomputers that has substantially more processors than any supercomputer currently available for cloud computing research.

This effort is the first of its kind in terms of the size and scale of the machine, and the first in making available a supercomputer to academic institutions in India.

The Yahoo!/CRL effort is intended to leverage CRL’s expertise in high performance computing and Yahoo!’s technical leadership in Apache Hadoop, an open source distributed computing project of the Apache Software Foundation, to enable scientists to perform data-intensive computing research on a 14,400 processor supercomputer.

Called the EKA, CRL’s supercomputer has 14,400 processors, 28 terabytes of memory, 140 terabytes of disks, a peak performance of 180 trillion calculations per second (180 teraflops), and sustained computation capacity of 120 teraflops for the LINPACK benchmark.

“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.

“We are excited to partner with Yahoo! to advance cloud computing research in India as it opens up a new arena of exciting opportunities,” said Dr. Gautam Shroff, member of the steering committee of CRL.