Yahoo, Carnegie Mellon Switch On Supercomputer

The M45 supercomputer provided by Yahoo opened its ports to its partners at Carnegie Mellon University, where the initiative should help boost research that benefits the broader Internet community.

The M45, Yahoo’s supercomputing cluster, has approximately 4,000 processors, three terabytes of memory, 1.5 petabytes of disks, and a peak performance of more than 27 trillion calculations per second (27 teraflops), placing it among the top 50 fastest supercomputers in the world.

Their ranking claim won't be confirmed until the next SC07 conference in Reno, so it will be interesting to see how M45 measures against the best in the world. Yahoo's M45 figures should put it in the top 30.

We chatted with Yahoo's Ron Brachman, VP for worldwide research operations with the company. He's also wearing the hat as head of academic relationships. Jay Kistler, VP for engineering system tools & services, also talked with us ahead of this morning's announcement.

Brachman said the M45 supercomputer came about from the opportunity for Yahoo and the university community to advance science and technology on an Internet scale. They have opted to focus on open source, developing solutions for large scale distributed computing.

Yahoo and Carnegie Mellon understand grid computing well. The M45 setup has been geared toward that understanding. It's capable of partitioning large data sets thanks to the installation of MapReduce and

Research takes time, but the M45 platform should substantially improve the total time needed for these projects to bear productive results. Some very lucky geek types started researching on this platform today.