Yahoo! Inc. and Computational Research Laboratories (CRL), a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons Limited, today announced an agreement to jointly support cloud computing research.  As part of the agreement, CRL will make available to researchers one of the world’s top five supercomputers that has substantially more processors than any supercomputer currently available for cloud computing research. 

"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. 

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

"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.  With this supercomputing cluster, researchers were able to analyze hundreds of millions of Web documents and handle two orders of magnitude more data than they previous could," said Ron Brachman, vice president and head of academic relations for 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."