Purdue Added to Yahoo! M45 Academic Research Initiative

11-03-2010

Today, as scientists at the top US universities extend their research initiatives to the new frontiers of computing, Yahoo! announced the expansion of its M45 academic research initiative to include four additional marquee universities: Stanford, the University of Washington, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and Purdue. These schools join Carnegie Mellon University, Cornell University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst on the supercomputing cluster, which brings a unique Internet-scale computing environment to academic researchers.

Three professors at Purdue will use M45 in their research projects. Bharat Bhargava in Computer Science will develop a context-aware navigation system for blind and visually impaired people.  Luo Si, also in Computer Science, will investigate search techniques for large-scale information retrieval for different types of entities such as persons and organizations. Yung-Hsiang Lu in Electrical and Computer Engineering will develop services for mobile users and investigate techniques to protect privacy.

Named after a well-known open star cluster, M45 is a 4,000-processor supercomputer that is one of the fifty most powerful systems in the world. Currently, researchers do not have the means of performing a large-scale systems software research, and this initiative will allow Yahoo! and the selected universities to expand the boundaries.

“Yahoo! is dedicated to working with leading universities to solve some of the most critical computing challenges facing our industry,” said Ron Brachman, vice president and head of Yahoo! academic relations. “Launching this program and M45 is a significant milestone in creating a global, collaborative research community working to advance the new sciences of the Internet. This milestone is a key element of Yahoo!’s growing Academic Relations effort.”

Yahoo! is a founding member of Open Cirrus Cloud Computing Testbed and Open Cloud Consortium, both facilitating scientific research in the cloud.  More information about the M45 project is available at https://research.yahoo.com/news/yahoo-expands-its-m45-cloud-computing-initiative

 

Source:

Thomas Kwan, Director of Research Operations, Yahoo! Research
tkwan@yahoo-inc.com