Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) and India-based business conglomerate Tata Sons announced Monday an agreement to work together on research clouds.

Under the agreement, Tata subsidiary Computational Research Laboratories will make available to researchers its supercomputer. EKA called, the system is ranked the fourth fastest supercomputer in the world, Yahoo said.

For its part, Yahoo plans to lend its technical expertise in Hadoop Apache, an open source distributed computing project of the Apache Software Foundation.

Cloud computing refers to the use of giant data centers to run applications that users can access from a PC or mobile device. Companies offering such software on the Internet Web companiesGoogle (NSDQ: GOOG), Yahoo and Salesforce.com. Microsoft is also launching a program offered as a Web service.

The supercomputer in CSF Yahoo / Tata project includes 14400 processors, 28 TB of memory and 140 TB of disks. The system has a peak performance of 180 trillion calculations per second (teraflops) and a sustained capacity of calculating 120 teraflops. The only supercomputer funded by the private sector, EKA will run the latest version of Yahoo and other Hadoop supported, open source software for distributed computing, such as pig parallel programming language developed by the Yahoo search.

“Launching our cloud computer program with the International LCR is another important milestone in the creation of a global, the work community collaborative research to advance the new science of the Internet,” Ron Brachman, vice president and Chief Yahoo university relations, said in a statement.

Yahoo and Tata made the announcement on the eve of the first summit Hadoop. Sponsored by Yahoo and the Community Computing Consortium, which is funded by the National Science Foundation, the summit should focus Hadoop leaders of the community of developers and users to discuss current projects and future directions of the cloud-environment Computer, Yahoo said.