Platform wants to out-map, out-reduce Hadoop
Chewing on big data using the MapReduce protocol, and the open source Hadoop stack that implements it, is all the rage these days. But there is more than one way to stuff an elephant.
The Hadoop tool created by Yahoo! (and named after a stuffed elephant) is now managed by the Apache Software Foundation, and it is the tool of choice for running MapReduce algorithms against unstructured data. Platform Computing, the pioneer of grid computing that has been plying the HPC racket for two decades, says it has created a better way to run MapReduce algorithms against big data: Plunk it on Platform's Symphony financial grid software.
Platform has not ported Hadoop to the Symphony tool or somehow split open its code and shimmed chunks of Hadoop into Symphony, explains Ken Hertzler, vice president of product management at the company. Instead, Hertzler tells El Reg, Platform has grabbed the Hadoop MapReduce APIs, which are written in Java just like Hadoop and Symphony are, and embedded support for the MapReduce APIs into Symphony.
