Yahoo Cloud Computing with 4th Largest Supercomputer in World

March 24, 2008

Yahoo announced an agreement today with Computational Research Laboratories (CRL) to support cloud computing research. At Search Engine Strategies (SES) New York last week, Yahoo Chief Scientist Andrew Tomkins previewed the future of search in his keynote address. (For a video of his keynote click here soon.) No doubt cloud computing will one day make search engine innovations possible that we can only dream of today.

CRL, a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons Ltd., a Mumbai, India-based industrial conglomerate, will lend one of the world’s top five supercomputers to Yahoo for joint research. The CRL supercomptuter has “substantially more processors than any supercomputer currently available,” according to Yahoo.

The first Data-Intensive Computing Symposium held at Yahoo’s campus this week will bring together leading industry and academic experts from all aspects of data-intensive distributed computing.

The symposium is part of a larger effort to explore opportunities for research and application of large-scale computing to benefit applications ranging from machine translation to genomic medicine.

So who in the world are CRL and Tata?

Tata Sons Limited–founded in 1868–could be the poster boy for The Big Switch, a brilliant book by SES keynote speaker, thought leader, and Mike Arrington BFF Nick Carr on the transformation of corporations and computing leading up to the Age of the Internet and beyond Google.

Tata Sons Limited has reinvented itself to keep pace with global changes in technology. The privately-held company, founded in 1868, provides voice and data-based business outsourcing services through one of its subsidiaries.

Tata, through its subsidiaries, provides solutions for projects in water supply and wastewater, industry, power, and chemicals; identification of land, project conceptualization, designing, construction, marketing, and management of residential and commercial complexes; financial consultancy services, financial planning, investment banking and strategy consulting services.

The company also engages in the exploration and production of crude oil and natural gas.

Tata companies include Tata Chemicals, Indian Hotels, Tata Motors, Tata Steel, Tata Tea, TACO, Tata Technologies, Titan Industries, and Tata Communications.

That’s a lot of computing power to put in the clouds. The Yahoo/CRL effort promises to leverage CRL’s expertise in high performance computing and Yahoo’s technical leadership in the Apache Software Foundation’s Hadoop, an open source distributed computing project. The benefit: enables scientists to perform data-intensive computing research on a 14,400 processor supercomputer.

The first ever Hadoop Summit (sponsored by Yahoo! and the Computing Community Consortium (CCC), funded by the National Science Foundation), brings together Hadoop developer and user communities to discuss current projects and future directions of the cloud computing environment.