After initial announcement, would be Hadoop competitor releases its code to the wild
I initially wrote about HPCC, the open source high powered computing off shoot from Lexis-Nexis almost 3 months ago. At that time the start up within the large company announced that after years of development and support, they were going to open source the engine that drives their clustered high performance computing engine. I had a great meeting with Armando Escalante, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, LexisNexis Risk Solutions and President of HPCC as well as his key staff members to discuss their big plans to take on Hadoop in the Big Data market.
Since that time while HPCC has been moving along on its plans to be more competitive and offer another alternative, some in the open source community wanted to see Lexis-Nexis jump into the open source pool with both feet. If they really wanted HPCC to be open source, then they had to make the source code available. Yesterday, HPCC finally took the plunge and has now released the source code to anyone who would like to download it. The source is available on GitHub right here.
I spoke to Armando about this big next step for HPCC last week. He sounded a bit like a nervous parent about to send his child off to college. Hoping they come home better, smarter and more mature, but also knowing that on their own anything can happen. But he recognized that releasing the code was a must if HPCC is going to seriously challenge Hadoop in the Big Data market.
Hadoop continues to gain lots of support and momentum in the marketplace. Even with Lexis-Nexis behind them, HPCC has to considered an underdog in its quest to compete. The HPCC team is really trying hard to set up local communities though. To that end they are doing a series of “meetups” throughout the country. There is one right here in my town, Boca Raton, Fl on September 15th that I will try to attend. If you like in or near a major city, there is probably one near you too. You should check the link.
The meetups will serve as both introduction, training, case studies and social networking events as Lexis-Nexis tries to seed a community to adopt and run with HPCC. In the meantime they are still solidly behind the project with a full team of developers continuing to evolve and develop the engine.
How much headway they can make against Hadoop remains to be seen, it should be interesting to watch if this town is big enough for both.
