Yahoo inks cloud computing research pact with Tata unit

Yahoo said Monday that it has signed a cloud computing research pact with Computational Research Laboratories, a Pune, India-based subsidiary of Tata.

Under the deal, Computational Research Laboratories (CRL) will make one of its supercomputers available for cloud computing research. Yahoo says it will use its CRL partnership to test scale, apply high performance computing techniques to the cloud and leverage knowledge of Apache Hadoop, which is an open source distributed computing project favored by Yahoo.

According to Yahoo's statement, CRL has the fourth fastest supercomputer--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. CRL's supercomputer, dubbed EKA, is the only one in the top 10 fastest systems that's available for commercial use.

Yahoo said:

EKA is expected to run the latest version of Hadoop and other state-of-the-art, Yahoo!-supported, open-source distributed computing software such as the Pig parallel programming language developed by Yahoo! Research.

Yahoo has been increasingly showing its open source and research chops in a bid to close an engineering gap with Google and fend off Microsoft's $44.6 billion bid. Yahoo is also hosting a Hadoop Summit that begins tomorrow.