Yahoo Moves Into Cloud Computing

By Greg McNevin

March 26, 2008: Search giant Yahoo! has just signed a deal with the Tata Group’s Computational Research Laboratories (CRL), which will see the two team up on a new cloud computing research project in India.

The deal will see CRL lend its EKA supercomputer, one of the world’s top five, to the project, giving researchers access to substantially more processors than any supercomputer currently available for cloud computing research.

EKA is the fourth fastest supercomputer in the world. Wielding 14,400 processors, 28 terabytes of memory and 140 terabytes of storage, its performance peaks at180 trillion calculations per second (180 teraflops), and can provide a sustained computation capacity of 120 teraflops for the LINPACK benchmark.

For Yahoo’s end it will provide technical leadership in the open source Apache Hadoop, the Apache Software Foundation’s distributed computing project.

“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.

Comment on this story