Hadoop in Perspective: Systems for Scientific Computing by Evert Lammerts.
From the post:
When the term scientific computing comes up in a conversation it’s usually just the occasional science geek who shows signs of recognition. But although most people have little or no knowledge of the field’s existence, it has been around since the second half of the twentieth century and has played an increasingly important role in many technological and scientific developments. Internet search engines, DNA analysis, weather forecasting, seismic analysis, renewable energy, and aircraft modeling are just a small number of examples where scientific computing is nowadays indispensible.
Apache Hadoop is a newcomer in scientific computing, and is welcomed as a great new addition to already existing systems. In this post I mean to give an introduction to systems for scientific computing, and I make an attempt at giving Hadoop a place in this picture. I start by discussing arguably the most important concept in scientific computing: parallel computing; what is it, how does it work, and what tools are available? Then I give an overview of the systems that are available for scientific computing at SURFsara, the Dutch center for academic IT and home to some of the world’s most powerful computing systems. I end with a short discussion on the questions that arise when there’s many different systems to choose from.
A good overview of the range of options for scientific computing, where, just as with more ordinary problems, no one solution is the best for all cases.