Image via Wikipedia

Yahoo Inc, the battered internet giant, is helping institutions in India to modify their curriculum so that students are trained on cloud computing technologies. Even though the name Yahoo doesn’t usually come up in many discussions related to Cloud Computing, they are doing some really great work from behind. They are a big contributor and supporter of the Hadoop Project with major contributions to Hadoop Core, HBase, Pig, etc.. They launched world’s largest Hadoop production application last year and also host Hadoop Summit. Yahoo also collaborated with Computational Research Laboratories in India, home of world’s 4th largest supercomputer, to help scientists perform data intensive computation. This is a powerful supercomputer and when coupled with Yahoo’s expertise on Hadoop, the scientists get a really powerful platform for their needs

it has 14,400 processors, 28 terabytes of memory, 140 terabytes of disks, a peak performance of 180 trillion calculations per second (180 teraflops), and sustained computation capacity of 120 teraflops for the LINPACK benchmark.

Yahoo, HP and Intel teamed up with Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany to create a Cloud Computing test bed to help understand issues on the software, hardware, data center level when computing is done on a massive scale in the Clouds. The website of Cloud Computing group at Yahoo Research is here.

Yesterday, Economic Times points out to another effort by Yahoo to promote Cloud Computing. They are teaming up with an academic institute in Hyderabad, India, to setup infrastructure for research in this field. This will help both undergraduate and masters students do research on topics related to Cloud Computing.

The goal of this collaboration is to help researchers at Yahoo! India R&D and IIIT-H share and gain from the knowledge and tools in the area of cloud computing , and encourage IIIT-H research students to take up research in cloud computing. Cloud computing is being offered as an optional course in undergraduate and postgraduate curricula at IIIT-H.

In fact, one of my biggest worries about Yahoo’s current situation is that their strong support for Opensource and Cloud Computing might loosen up quite a bit, if they are either acquired by Microsoft or by any other company.