Yahoo has announced expanded partnerships with four U.S. universities to advance cloud computing research.
Yahoo has announced expanded partnerships with four U.S. universities to advance cloud computing research.
The four universities include the University of California at
Berkeley, Cornell University and the University of Massachusetts at
Amherst, which will join Carnegie Mellon University in using 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, Yahoo
officials said.
Yahoo and school officials said academic researchers have had
limited access to Internet-scale supercomputers for conducting systems
and applications research. To help alleviate this, Yahoo is granting
these four universities access to the Yahoo cloud computing cluster.
The Yahoo cluster, also known as M45, has been operational since
November 2007 and in use by Carnegie Mellon. The cluster has
approximately 4,000 processor-cores and 1.5 petabytes of disks.
"We have been using the Yahoo cluster for more than a year now and
have made significant progress in a number of key research areas,
resulting in the publication of more than two dozen academic papers,"
said Randal Bryant, dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie
Mellon. "Our researchers were able to extract and process documents
from the Web in a way that was not possible before, changing the way we
think about research problems. We were also able to conduct research
over a corpus of 200 million Web pages, processing two orders of
magnitude more data. We conducted systems software research, comparing,
for example, the performance of the Hadoop file system and other
parallel file systems. The simultaneous access to applications and
systems software has been a real benefit and we look forward to our
continued partnership with Yahoo and joint contributions to the cloud
computing community."
"Yahoo is dedicated to working with leading universities to solve
some of the most critical computing challenges facing our industry,"
said Ron Brachman, vice president and head of Yahoo Academic Relations.
"The ability to access and analyze massive data sets is becoming
increasingly crucial to the advancement of Internet-related computer
science and cross-disciplinary research. 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."
Darryl K. Taft covers the development tools and developer-related issues beat from his office in Baltimore. He has more than 10 years of experience in the business and is always looking for the next scoop. Taft is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was named 'one of the most active middleware reporters in the world' by The Middleware Co. He also has his own card in the 'Who's Who in Enterprise Java' deck.
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