Yahoo sets up Grid Computing Lab at IIT Madras

 Yahoo India R&D in partnership with the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT- Madras) has announced the launch ofYahoo Grid Computing Lab at the IIT- Madras campus. This cluster of high-end servers at the lab will allow researchers to access web-scale data and conduct research on big data andcloud computing systems. 

Cloud services empower companies to dramatically improve agility and innovation at web scale. As more companies are moving their services to the cloud, it has emerged as an important area of research to explore new approaches in the field. The partnership will support researchers at IIT- Madras to process and analyze huge volumes of structured and unstructured data which, to date, has been limited due to significant cost barriers in getting large computing systems operational. 

Hari Vasudev, VP, connections, Yahoo said, "At Yahoo we believe that open and collaborative research is the best way towards building the next generation of the web. By partnering with premier institutes like IIT-Madras, we hope to spur research in big data problems in areas such as search, personalization and digital advertising." 

"We are excited to partner with Yahoo! to advance cloud computing research in India as it opens up a new arena of exciting opportunities for our students. We are hopeful such partnerships will allow students to conduct truly breakthrough work on cloud computing and data storage systems, ultimately leading to web innovations coming to the marketplace," s aid Prof. D Janakiram, Department of Computer Science, IIT-Madras 

Yahoo, the digital media company, has been an early investor in cloud and big data, founding Hadoop - an open source technology at the epicentre of big data and cloud computing, enabling organizations to get insights from the massive amounts of data being created and collected every day. The company operates one of the world's largest private cloud infrastructures handling 11 billion page visits per month and 100 billion events a day (200 petabytes of data) from its 700 million users. Yahoo India R&D had previously established a similar lab at the IIT Bombay campus, which conducts research in data management and natural language processing.