Monday, December 8, 2008

Yahoo taps EKA supercomputer

In a research pact with Yahoo Inc., India's Computational Research Labs (CRL) will provide its EKA supercomputer—claimed to the fourth fastest in the world—for research into cloud computing, which aims to provide supercomputing power over the Internet.

Researchers on the project will tap Apache Hadoop (an open-source distributed computing project of the Apache Software Foundation) to perform data-intensive computing research using CRL's EKA, a 14,400-processor supercomputer that delivers 28Tbytes of memory, 140Tbytes of disk space, peak performance of 180Tflops and a sustained computation capacity of 120Tflops by the Linpack benchmark.

Of the top 10 supercomputers in the world, EKA is the only supercomputer funded by the private sector. It is available for use on commercial terms.

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

"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, a subsidiary of India's Tata Sons Ltd.

"We have made our leadership in supporting academic cloud computing research very concrete by sharing a 4,000-processor supercomputer with computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University for the last three months," said Ron Brachman, VP and head of academic relations at Yahoo. "Launching our cloud computing program internationally with CRL is another significant milestone in creating a global, collaborative research community working to advance the new sciences of the Internet."

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