WebProNews

Yahoo said today it is expanding its cloud computing research efforts and has partnered with three more U.S. universities.

The University of California at Berkley, Cornell University and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst will join Carnegie Mellon University in using Yahoo's cloud computing cluster to conduct large-scale systems software research.

Yahoo says the research will focus on new applications that analyze Internet-scale data sets, ranging from voting records to online news sources.

Carnegie Mellon has been using the Yahoo cluster, also known as M45, since November 2007. The cluster has about 4,000 processor-cores and 1.5 petabytes of disks. Yahoo's M45 cluster runs Hadoop, an open source file system that allows researchers to process large amounts of data.

"Hadoop powers many of our most broadly used and complex systems at Yahoo!, from Web search to optimizing content for the home page," said Shelton Shugar, senior vice president of cloud computing at Yahoo!.

"Continuing to invest in the open source community and in technologies like Hadoop is an important element in our efforts to drive breakthroughs in Internet-scale computing and ultimately to continually improve the quality of the consumer experience of Yahoo!. By partnering with these top educational institutions to share our M45 cluster and our technical expertise, we hope to further key insights into the next generation of systems software research and development."