SARA, the Dutch National High Performance Computing (HPC) and e-Science Support Center, is organizing a “Hadoop Hackton“.

The event is scheduled for December 7th 2010 to be held at their premises in Amsterdam (Science Park 121).

The “hackathon” will be a hands-on introduction to Hadoop. Attendees are invited to come spend a day at SARA to play with the system, with the support of two experienced users, Edgar Meij (UvA) and Djoerd Hiemstra (UT).  Work can be done either on your own or in groups and analyze your own data-set or play with for example the Wikipedia, ENRON or White House access records data-sets. Programming skills will be assumed, and you need to take your own laptops.

The event will start at 9:30 and end around 17:00, needless to say:  Daniele Salemi and I will be there, we’d like to pass the word because we think this can be a very enriching experience for a “reality check” of the Hadoop status-quo. It’s not every day that you fill a room of real, motivated Map-Reduce users and you give them an HPC install to play with.

Curious about how much “Ommph” you are supposed to master?

The PoC will be hosted on 6 glorious SUN ORACLE Thumper, each sporting 24TB of storage and 4 cores.

A separate Namenode and Jobtracker will be part of the setup. The installed Hadoop distribution will be Cloudera’s CDH3.

What are you waiting for? Indeed, there iss nothing to wait: contact Dr. Evert Lammers of SARA asap to reserve your place. Did I tell you that SARA is the Dutch supernode in the international Science Grid? No? Well now you have a pretty good idea where this is going to happen.

See you there!!!