Microsoft Research Releases Another Hadoop Alternative for Azure

Posted by: From ReadWriteWeb Posted date: July 18, 2011 In: Big Data, Cloud | comment : 0

Today Microsoft Research announced the availability of a free technology preview of Project Daytona MapReduce Runtime for Windows Azure. Using a set of tools for working with big data based on Google’s MapReduce paper, it provides an alternative to Apache Hadoop.

Daytona was created by the eXtreme Computing Group at Microsoft Research. It’s designed to help scientists take advantage of Azure for working with large, unstructured data sets. Daytona is also being used to power a data-analytics-as-a-service offering the team calls Excel DataScope.

Big Data Made Easy?

The team’s goal was to make Daytona easy to use. Roger Barga, an architect in the eXtreme Computing Group, was quoted saying:

“‘Daytona’ has a very simple, easy-to-use programming interface for developers to write machine-learning and data-analytics algorithms. They don’t have to know too much about distributed computing or how they’re going to spread the computation out, and they don’t need to know the specifics of Windows Azure.”

To accomplish this difficult goal (MapReduce is not known to be easy) Microsoft Research is including a set of example algorithms and other sample code along with a step-by-step guide for creating new algorithms.