Yahoo! Aids University In Computer Research

Cornell researches will have greater access to Internet-scale supercomputers for conducting systems and applications research as a result of Yahoo! granting the University access to its cloud computing cluster, ccording to a Yahoo! Research press release.
In an effort to expand its cooperation with top U.S. universities, Yahoo! Inc. will collaborate with Cornell, U.C. Berkeley and University of Massachusetts at Amherst, along with Carnegie Mellon. Yahoo!’s cloud computing cluster will enable Cornell, along with these other universities, to conduct research of large-scale systems software rand explore new applications.
A cluster is two or more computer systems that act together to perform a single function, according to a paper by Edward Whalen, vice president and principle consultant at Performance Tuning Corporation.
The Yahoo! cluster has been operational since November 2007. Carnegie Mellon has been using the cluster for more than a year. The cluster has approximately 4,000 processor-cores and 1.5 petabytes of disks, the press release stated.
The Yahoo! computer cluster, also known as M45, will be a tool to further research in the computer sciences department.
Cornell faculty have expressed enthusiasm for this partnership.
“Our partnership with Yahoo! will enable us to attack problems ranging from wildlife preservation and biodiversity to balancing socio-economic needs and the environment, to large-scale deployment and management of renewable energy sources,” Prof. Bob Constable, computer science, dean of the faculty of Computing and Information Science, stated in a press release. “We recently established the Institute of Computational Sustainability at Cornell to focus on computational problems in these areas, and Yahoo!’s cluster will help us solve large scale optimization and machine learning problems to find better ways to manage our natural resources.”