Yahoo announced on Thursday that it is partnering with three more U.S. universities to expand the efforts on cloud computing research.

The University of California at Berkeley, Cornell University and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst will join Carnegie Mellon University in using Yahoo's cloud computing cluster, the company said in a statement.

Cloud computing is an emerging IT development, deployment and delivery model, which enables real-time delivery of products, services and solutions over the Internet.

Yahoo pointed out that academic researchers so far have had limited access to Internet-scale supercomputers for conducting systems and applications research, and its partnering with more universities will help alleviate the obstacle.

The universities will take advantage of Yahoo's cloud computing cluster to conduct large-scale systems software research and explore new applications that analyze Internet-scale data sets, ranging from voting records to online news sources.

The Yahoo cloud computing cluster, also known as M45, has about4,000 processor-cores and 1.5 petabytes of disks.

"The ability to access and analyze massive data sets is becoming increasingly crucial to the advancement of Internet-related computer science and cross-disciplinary research," said Ron Brachman, Yahoo's vice president.

"By expanding our university-facing cloud computing program to partner with more universities, we hope to catalyze data-intensive computing research, furthering our commitment to the global, collaborative research community advancing the new sciences of the Internet," he added.