I guess, but at an HPC conference I went to last year there was a big session on Hadoop and introducing it to the researchers as a potential alternative for cer

I guess, but at an HPC conference I went to last year there was a big session on Hadoop and introducing it to the researchers as a potential alternative for certain tasks. I also believe that technologies take a lot longer to penetrate academia then industry given the nature of academics so I don't doubt Hadoop's slow acceptance into the HPC community. Look at GPUs for example. They've been around for a while but it's really only been in the last few years that the tool has been put into the toolkits of researchers. I do know one professor math professor who just a few hundred thousand on a Hadoop cluster to experiment with numerical algorithms. Talking with him, and I trust his opinion since he does research specifically in high performance linear algebra, was that he thought the technology was very appealing and can be an excellent addition to the repertoire. However there is still much work to be done since numerical linear algebra (which is the backbone of almost every single HPC calculation) using the Hadoop framework is very young. I believe it'll take a few years for researchers to determine whether or not Hadoop could be a useful tool for solving the types of problems academics do or whether it's just not as effective as the current tools.