Yahoo! Expands M45 Supercomputing Initivative, selects U-M

Yahoo! has announced the expansion of its Hadoop-based M45 academic research initiative to include four additional US universities, including the University of Michigan. The M45 program provides universities with the opportunity to conduct research otherwise impossible without the power and speed of an Internet-scale supercomputing resource. M45 consists of approximately 4,000 processors with 1.5 petabytes of storage.

Hadoop, the open source technology at the epicenter of big data and cloud computing, is the core data analysis technology used across Yahoo!, and is used by all the universities participating in the M45 research initiative. Yahoo! benefits from university contributions to the Hadoop code base as well as through insights from cutting edge research initiatives conducted on Yahoo’s M45 supercomputer.

Researchers at the U-M who will make use of the M45 include investigators in the EECS department and School of Information. They include:

Eytan Adar, Assistant Professor of Information and CSE. Adar’s main research focus is how information changes over time, in particular mining text, user behavior, and structure.

Michael Cafarella, Assistant Professor of CSE. Cafarella is interested in large-scale data-intensive computing and Web information management and extraction.

Robert Dick, Associate Professor of ECE. Dick works on modeling and optimizing the performance, power consumption, temperature, and reliability of application-specific and embedded computers.

Georg Essl, Assistant Professor of CSE and Music. Essl’s work is centered on mobile computing devices and applications, especially those that help to integrate computer science with music and the arts.

Z. Morley Mao, Associate Professor of CSE. Mao’s primary interest is networking, in particular Internet routing, routing security, and network measurement.

Qiaozhu Mei, Assistant Professor of Information. Mei’s research area is text information management, in particular information retrieval and text mining with applications in social media, bioinformatics, and other areas.

Brian Noble, Associate Professor of CSE. Noble is broadly interested in software, networking, and infrastructure issues for mobile computing systems.

Thomas F. Wenisch, Assistant Professor of CSE. Wenisch works in the general area of computer systems architecture with particular emphasis on data centers and enterprise scale systems.