IIT Bombay launches Hadoop Cluster Lab in association with Yahoo

Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB), yesterday launched the Hadoop Cluster Lab at the Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) Department at IIT, Bombay. The laboratory has been set up in association with Yahoo India Research & Development.

IIT Bombay director Professor Devang Khakhar and Yahoo Labs' senior vice president Prabhakar Raghavan inaugurated the new laboratory.

Hadoop is a Java-based framework that supports data intensive distributed applications under a free license and allows high scalability and massive parallel data intensive computations.

The lab will help students, researchers and faculty in the web-scale data research domain including web search, text mining, data management and natural language processing. The facility will expose students, faculty and researchers to cloud computing environment. It will also support research study of advanced ranking and searching techniques.

The facility has been set up with Yahoo India Research & Development's donation of its open source Hadoop Cluster software, web data and hardware, including two 42 HP server racks powered by Intel Xeon 8 core processors with 8 GB RAM and 3 TB disc.

Khakhar, director IIT Bombay said the institute was thankful to Yahoo for donating the cluster to IIT Bombay. He said the cluster would help researchers working in the area of data mining and web search and also help foster greater interaction between IIT Bombay and Yahoo.
Khakhar said the initiative would help build links with the industry with such programmes and engagements.