Yahoo has tied up with Tata subsidiary Computational Research Laboratories (CRL) to do cloud computing research. Financial terms were not disclosed.

What CRL brings to the party is the fourth-fastest supercomputer in the world, a beast that Yahoo figures has “substantially more processors than any other supercomputer currently available for cloud research” – 14,400 of them to be precise along with 28TB of memory, 140TB of disk space, a peak performance of 180 trillion calculations a second and sustained computation capacity of 120 teraflops.

Yahoo is kicking in its expertise with Apache Hadoop, the open source distributed computing project.

The machine, which is called the EKA, the only supercomputer funded by the private sector and available for use on commercial terms, is supposed to run the latest version of Hadoop and other Yahoo-supported open source distributed computing software like the Pig parallel programming language that Yahoo Research developed.

Yahoo says the effort will be the first of its kind in terms of the size and scale of machine and the first to make a supercomputer available to academic institutions in India.

Meanwhile, IBM has teamed up with Georgia Tech and Ohio State University to develop autonomic technology for cloud computing expecting self-managing features for virtualized data centers in a cloud computing environment out of it.

The project will create a prototype computing cloud that links data centers at the two schools called the Critical Enterprise Cloud Computing Services facility and will push Tivoli as a management tool and SOA to link different software silos running at both sites.