Microsoft drops Dryad; bets on Hadoop
In a November 11 post on the Windows HPC Team Blog, officials said that Microsoft had provided a minor update to the latest test build of the Dryad code as part of Windows High Performance Computing (HPC) Pack 2008 R2 Service Pack (SP) 3. But they also noted that “this will be the final (Dryad) preview and we do not plan to move forward with a production release.”
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But it now appears Microsoft is putting all its big-data eggs in the Hadoop framework basket. Microsoft officials said a month ago that Microsoft was working with Hortonworks to develop both a Windows Azure and a Windows Server distribution of Hadoop. A Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the Windows Azure version is due out before the end of this calendar year; the Windows Server test build of Hadoop is due some time in 2012.
It might be a good time for the Hadoop community, which now includes MS, to talk about studying the syntax and semantics of the Hadoop eco-system that can be standardized.
It would be nice to see competition between Hadoop products on the basis of performance and features, not learning the oddities of particular implementations. The public versions could set a baseline and commercial versions would be pressed to better that.
After all, there those who contend that commercial code is measurably better than other types of code. Perhaps it is time to put their faith to the test.