Yahoo! India R&D, in partnership with the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras), announced the launch of Yahoo! Grid Computing Lab at the IIT Madras campus. The cluster of high-end servers at the lab will allow researchers to access web-scale data and conduct research on Big Data and cloud computing systems.

The partnership will support researchers at IIT Madras to process and analyze huge volumes of structured and unstructured data which, to date, has been limited due to significant cost barriers in getting large computing systems operational.

Hari Vasudev, Vice President, Connections, Yahoo! Inc. said, “By partnering with premier institutes like IIT-Madras, we hope to spur research in Big Data problems in areas such as search, personalization and digital advertising.”

“We are hopeful such partnerships will allow students to conduct truly breakthrough work on cloud computing and data storage systems, ultimately leading to web innovations coming to the marketplace,” said Prof. D Janakiram, Department of Computer Science, IIT-Madras.

Yahoo! India R&D had previously established a similar lab at the IIT Bombay campus, which conducts research in data management and natural language processing.