MUMBAI, INDIA: Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB), in association with Yahoo India Research & Development, today launched Hadoop Cluster Lab at the Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) Department here.

IIT Bombay director Professor Devang and Yahoo Labs' senior vice president Prabhakar Raghavan inaugurated the Hadoop Cluster Lab. Hadoop is a Java-based framework to support data intensive distributed applications under a free license for high scalability and massive parallel data intensive computations.

The lab is aimed at helping the students, researchers and faculty in the domain of Web-scale data research including web search, text mining, data management and natural language processing. With this facility, students, faculty and researchers will get exposure to cloud computing environment and also will support research study of advance searching and ranking techniques.

Yahoo India Research & Development donated its open source Hadoop Cluster software, web data and hardware, which included two racks of 42 HP servers based on Intel Xeon 8 crore processors with 8 GB RAM and 3 TB disc.

“We are very thankful to Yahoo for donating the cluster to IIT Bombay. The cluster will help researchers working in the area of data mining and web search and also will help in greater interaction between IIT Bombay and Yahoo,” said Professor Devang Khakhar, director IIT Bombay.

About the initiative, Professor Khakhar opined that it is intended in building links with the industry using such programs and engagements.

The Internet search company donated the hardware and software to IIT Bombay about a few months back, which was then installed, configured and made live by a team of researchers, faculty and students in a lab.

Yahoo labs' senior vice president Prabhakar Raghavan said, IIT Bombay is the first institute to have the cluster in India. “About two years back, Yahoo had donated the cluster to Carnegie Mellon University in US and it had immense success in the area of research and education for the university. And it's the repetition of that success here in India at IIT Bombay,” he said.

A group of professors at IIT Bombay, led by Soumen Chakrabarti, Sunita Sarawagi and S. Sudarshan along with several faculty members, graduate and post students and researchers are working on the project here.

“Presently, web searches provides information based on queries but the information searched is not specific as there's lack of identification between two similar words or searches. Also, entity identification in relation with the search query is required in order to get the accuracy during web search,” said Chakrabarti, who has also authored a book, 'Mining the Web: Discovering Knowledge from Hypertext Data'.