Yahoo is launching an open source program for lending support to the research and development for systems software utilized in distributed computing. You may remember when Yahoo decided to back the Hadoop initiative, which was considered Yahoo's move to compete more directly with Google's techniques for storing and processing large amounts of data that’s distributed across a myriad of commodity PCs.
Well, now Yahoo is ready to push Hadoop to do just this. It will be made available in a supercomputing-class data center for academics performing systems software research. It's called the M45, after the noted open star clusters, boasting 4,000 processors, 3 terabytes of memory, 1.5 petabytes of disks, and a peak performance of 27 trillion calculations per second.