Carnegie Mellon University will become the first higher education institution to work with Yahoo!'s M45, a new project by the Internet firm designed to advance distributed computing research and software development.
The program, which leverages the Apache Software Foundation's open-source Hadoop, will allow researchers to test software running on a Yahoo!-provided 4,000-processor supercomputer. According to Yahoo!, its M45 project differs from other supercomputing projects in that it's focused exclusively on pushing the boundaries of large-scale systems software research. For the program, Yahoo! will make available to researchers a 4,000-processor computing cluster capable of performing 27 teraFLOPS and sporting 3 TB of memory and 1.5 petabytes of storage. It will run the latest version of Hadoop and other open-source software, including, the Pig parallel programming language. Carnegie Mellon will solve challenging information retrieval and large-scale graph problems on the cluster. Yahoo! plans to make M45 available to other institutions for research in the future
