Collected thoughts and musings George's Sun Blog

Tuesday Sep 02, 2008

Announcing the availability of an open-source "Live CD" aimed at providing new users to Hadoop with a fully functional, pre-configured Hadoop cluster that is easy to start up and use and lets people get a quick look at what Hadoop offers in terms of power and ease of use.  By lowering the barrier to getting Hadoop up and running, more people can try it out and explore its features.

The CD image provided gives users an environment emulating a fully distributed, three-node virtual Hadoop cluster.  One of the reasons we used OpenSolaris is its ability to emulate a multinode cluster environment in a very small memory foot print.  A three-node Map/Reduce cluster can be brought up on a machine with as little as 800 MB of memory.  Each additional virtual cluster node only requires about 40 MB of additional memory, in addition to the memory used by Hadoop.  This means that people can take Hadoop for a spin, even on their laptop.

The CD is also "live", meaning that it does not modify the contents of the user's computer. This makes it ideal for those wishing to try out Hadoop without having to install any software.  For example, students wishing to use Hadoop in a classroom lab environment can work entirely off of the CD.

Included in this release is Hadoop 0.17.1 running on OpenSolaris.  You can join the OpenSolaris Hadoop community online, as well as download the CD image, documentation, and other resources from http://opensolaris.org/os/project/livehadoop/  If you have any requests or suggestions for improvements to this distribution of Hadoop, please let us know through the community site, or join the discussion by sending an email to edu-discuss-subscribe@opensolaris.org
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