New York (PTI): Tata Group firm Computational Research Laboratories (CRL) will collaborate with internet giant Yahoo! to strengthen research activities on cloud computing technologies.

CRL, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Tata Sons Limited, has entered into an agreement with Yahoo! to jointly support cloud computing research.

Following the pact, EKA, which is one of the fastest supercomputers in the world, would be made available by CRL to the researchers, Yahoo! said in a statement on Tuesday.

Programmes are run from remote data centres through the cloud computing technologies.

"This partnership brings together Yahoo!'s leadership role in the development of Hadoop and CRL's expertise in high performance computing, and will help bridge the gap between traditional supercomputing and cloud computing research in India," said Chairman of Pune-based CRL S Ramadorai.

Further, EKA is expected to use the latest version of Apache Hadoop, an open source computing project, to enable scientists in performing data-intensive computing research.

Apache Handoop can handle huge amounts of data with the help of many computers.

Meanwhile, EKA is ranked the fourth fastest supercomputer in the world, with 14,400 processors, 28 terabytes of memory, 140 terabytes of disks and a peak performance of 180 trillion calculations per second (180 teraflops).