Yahoo said on Monday it would launch an open source program for developing software for distributed computing, with Carnegie Mellon University as its first academic partner in the venture.

Yahoo!'s program is intended to leverage its leadership in Hadoop, an open source distributed computing sub-project of the Apache Software Foundation, to enable researchers to modify and evaluate the systems software running on a 4,000 processor supercomputer provided by Yahoo!.

Yahoo has been a main supporter of Hadoop, an open source distributed computing sub-project of the Apache Software Foundation that lets users process massive amounts of data. The company said it would make Hadoop available to academic research in a supercomputing-class data center. Called the M45, Yahoo!'s supercomputing cluster, named after one of the best known open star clusters, it has approximately 4,000 processors, three terabytes of memory, 1.5 petabytes of disks, and a peak performance of more than 27 trillion calculations per second (27 teraflops). It is placed among the top 50 fastest supercomputers in the world.