Yahoo taps India supercomputer in cloud-computing push

Yahoo announced Monday that it has joined forces with the Pune, India-based Computational Research Laboratories (CRL) in order to support research in cloud computing, a way to outsource hardware and software to service providers rather than host it locally. Under the terms of the agreement, researchers will be able to use the EKA, a supercomputer owned by CRL that contains 28 terabytes of memory, 14,400 processors, 140 terabytes of disks, and a peak performance of 180 trillion calculations per second.

According to CRL, EKA is the world's fourth fastest supercomputer.

"We are excited to partner with Yahoo to advance cloud computing research in India as it opens up a new arena of exciting opportunities," Gautam Shroff, a member of CRL's steering committee, said in a statement. "We are initiating dialogue with leading Indian academic institutions to collaborate on research using cloud computing."

At the core of Yahoo's involvement is its role in the Apache Hadoop project, for which it opened an open-source research and development center last November. Yahoo and CRL's announcement was timed in conjunction with the inaugural Hadoop Summit, sponsored by Yahoo and the National Science Foundation-funded Computing Community Consortium.