Silver-lined clouds
Posted July 29th, 2008 at 8:04 am by Prabhakar Raghavan, Yahoo! Research
3 Comments / Filed in: Trends & News
Today, Internet science takes a big step into the clouds. In a partnership with tech giants HP and Intel, we’re creating a global, multi-datacenter research testbed for the advancement of cloud computing research and education. (What’s cloud computing? Think of it as the technology that makes it possible for computing resources to be provided as a service where you only pay for what you use.)
Academic research is facing new challenges in today’s Internet age. Universities often don’t have the equipment –- hardware and software -– to maintain in-depth research at Internet scale. Academic researchers are limited in the research they can conduct, and this, ultimately constrains the amount of large-scale Web innovations coming to the marketplace.
Here at Yahoo!, we believe in open and collaborative research as the best way towards building the next generation of the Web. As part of our dynamic Academic Relations program, we’re teaming up with academia, as well as other companies and governments across the globe, to invest in and pool together the large-scale computers that will let researchers conduct truly breakthrough work on cloud computing and data storage systems.
The HP/Intel/Yahoo! Cloud Research Testbed is a significant step in that it will not only allow researchers to run applications and data on large-scale supercomputers, they will be able to experiment and conduct research on a massive scale. It’s like letting them simulate a true Web environment and that’s exactly what you need to ensure which ideas will work in the wild.
Joining us in this first-ever large-scale international consortium are Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, with contributions from the National Science Foundation (NSF) as well.
This is all part of Yahoo!’s overall focus and investment in cloud computing and data infrastructure. We recently announced the formation of the Cloud Computing and Data Infrastructure Group (CCDI), a new group dedicated to building out our next-generation cloud infrastructure.
In addition, in November 2007, Yahoo! deployed a supercomputing-class data center, called the M45, for cloud computing research; Carnegie Mellon University was the first institution to take advantage of this supercomputer. In March 2008, Yahoo! announced an agreement with Computational Research Laboratories (CRL) to jointly support cloud computing research in India. The CRL supercomputer is one of the world’s top five supercomputers and is the first supercomputer available to academic institutions in India.
I speak for our many research scientists when I say we’re excited about this open testbed and being able to collaborate with leaders who share our same vision. The HP/Intel/Yahoo! Cloud Research Testbed is a truly global research effort, and more partners and researchers will be invited to join and participate in the program when all of the systems are up and running later this year. The sky is the limit from here on out.
Prabhakar Raghavan
Head of Yahoo! Research
Photo from Nicholas_T
Tagged: cloud computing, open, research
(Average: 3 out of 5)
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3 Comments Add your own
gag | July 29th, 2008 at 10:05 am
as a recent web user, its nice to see the web come together
well with Yahoo! going big in the direction of open source
and Google successfully working with everybody n opensource
Microsoft is where i would like to spend time now, learning about their research
well as a big company, Microsoft would care less about my curiosity but Internet is a big place and i as a web user, just dont have the time
n regarding cloud computing and other technologies today, its like the left n right hand dealing together with deck of cards building a pyramid, their should be no room for idiocracy at the top
as a web user, i wish all the Internet companies best
Mike McGregor | July 29th, 2008 at 10:30 am
Cloud Computing is going to be essential for small and medium sized businesses who can’t afford, or don’t need, their own massive data center. Shelly Palmer wrote an article on Amazon offering Simple Storage Service (S3), Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Simple Queuing Service and SimpleDB, which is already leveling the playing field for small businesses by offering them IT services for cheap. His article was featured on the Huffington Post and Seeking Alpha.
Mike McGregor
Advanced Media Ventures Group
Sukienki | August 8th, 2008 at 3:22 am
That’s very interestin article. Good work.
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