As scientists at the top US universities extend their research initiatives to the new frontiers of computing, Yahoo! has announced the expansion of its Hadoop-based M45 academic research initiative to include four additional US universities, including the University of Washington. Launched in November 2007, the M45 program is providing universities with the opportunity to conduct research otherwise impossible without the power and speed of a large-scale supercomputing resource. M45 consists of approximately 4,000 processors with 1.5 petabytes of storage.
Examples of academic research conducted on the M45 includes one of the world’s largest knowledge acquisition research projects — UW CSE’s KnowItAll.