Yahoo! India R&D has set up a grid computing lab at IIT Madras to facilitate research on “big data” and cloud computing.

This cluster of high-end servers at the lab will allow researchers to access web-scale data and conduct research on big data and cloud computing systems, according to a Yahoo! press release.

As more companies are moving their services to the cloud, it has emerged as an important area of research to explore new approaches in the field.

The partnership will support researchers at IIT Madras to process and analyse huge volumes of structured and unstructured data which, to date, has been limited due to significant cost barriers in getting large computing systems operational, says a Yahoo! press release.

Yahoo!, a digital media company, has been an early investor in cloud and big data, founding Hadoop – an open source technology at the epicentre of big data and cloud computing, enabling organisations to get insights from the massive amounts of data being created and collected every day.

The company operates one of the world’s largest private cloud, infrastructures handling 11 billion page visits a month and 100 billion events a day (200 petabytes of data) from its 700 million users, the release says.

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