Yahoo Bolsters Computer Science in Academia with Largest-Ever Server Donation

NEWS
Jun 25, 2015

image By Don McGillen

At Yahoo, we are excited to continue bolstering computer science in academia with our largest cumulative server donation ever. Yesterday, Yahoo Labs’ Academic Partnerships team and the Yahoo Data Center Operations group had the pleasure of delivering 480 servers to the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA). Combined with the 250 servers Yahoo donated to UTA in late 2012, the gift amounts to the most servers Yahoo has donated to any individual institution in our YSTAR (Yahoo Servers to Academic Researchers) program since its inception in 2010. The capabilities provided by the large clusters comprising these refurbished machines have enabled UTA faculty and grad students to perform more robust research with more computing power than ever before.

120 of the previously donated servers are deployed in UTA’s Research Modular Data Center used for doing research related to maximizing the use of airside economization, direct and indirect evaporative cooling, direct-to-chip liquid cooling, sustainable water and energy utilization in the cooling of mission-critical facility environments, and more. The remaining previously donated servers are deployed in the on-campus Yahoo Research Data Center Room and make possible and support a variety of research and educational initiatives.

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“Construction of our Research Modular Data Center would not have been possible without the generous donation of servers and PDUs from Yahoo.”

- UTA's Dereje Agonafer, Jenkins Garrett Professor of mechanical engineering

Yesterday’s donation exemplifies the growing relationship between Yahoo and UTA, and will significantly upgrade and expand the university’s capabilities to enhance outstanding programs. Those programs will include research involving computationally-intensive modeling in fluid dynamics, data mining, and big data analysis work. The machines will also make possible educational course work in big data analysis and cloud computing.

Through YSTAR, Yahoo has delivered over 5,000 servers to more than 40 academic institutions. We are proud to support research efforts such as those at UTA and look forward to future innovations aided by this donation.

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