(Link courtesy Amit Paranjape via e-mail)

Yahoo and CRL have just announced that they will collaborate on research into cloud computing. I believe this announcement is essentially about Yahoo’s use of Hadoop on CRL’s EKA supercomputer.

This Yahoo!/CRL announcement comes on the eve of the first ever Hadoop Summit. Apache Hadoop is a Free Java software framework that supports data intensive distributed applications running on large clusters of commodity computers. It enables applications to easily scale out to thousands of nodes and petabytes of data. In Feb 2008, Yahoo announced that its Search Webmap application has been converted to a Hadoop application that runs on a more than 10,000 core Linux cluster and produces data that is now used in every Yahoo! Web search query.

CRL’s EKA supercomputer is a Hewlett-Packard based system with 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. Of the top ten supercomputers in the world, EKA is the only supercomputer funded by the private sector that is available for use on commercial terms.

This announcement should also increase the interest in attending the presentation on EKA to be held here (i.e. in Pune) in a few days (Thursday, 27th March). The talk promises to be very interesting, especially given the background of speakers Dr. Lagu and Dr. Sherlekar (who used to be profs in IIT-B amongst other things). Details.