[Beowulf] hadoop

[Eugen Leitl]

On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 09:10:32AM +0100, Jonathan Aquilina wrote:
> Hey guys I was looking at the hadoop page and it got me wondering. is it
> possible to cluster together storage servers? If so how efficient would a
> cluster of them be?

An interesting problem would be to use reasonably powerful but
cheap ARM SoCs in few GBytes onboard RAM and some flash
for hybrid filesystems for each hard drive, and cluster 
them via GBit Ethernet on a very large scale.

That would be a custom Beowulf for more storage-related
tasks. E.g. an application I have in mind are volumetric
datasets with e.g. 8 nm - voxels for biological systems,
which are way too large to process in memory.