Cloud computing is becoming an important arena for researchers and developers to test next generation software services, and scalable software and systems is at the heart of providing cloud services via the Internet.

At Yahoo!, we are very supportive of academic research in cloud computing that, to date, has been limited due to significant cost barriers in getting large computing systems operational and the lack of software tools. By making large systems available and by contributing to open source software such as Pig and Hadoop, we hope to enable researchers and students to innovate and create new kinds of systems, applications, and tools, pushing the boundaries in this field.