Tom White's Blog

February 2006 Archives

Hadoop!

In a previous blog I wrote about Nutch's MapReduce implementation, for distributed processing of massive data sets. This, and the closely related Nutch Distributed File System (renamed Hadoop Distributed File System), have now been moved into a standalone project called Hadoop.

According to Doug Cutting, who created Hadoop (as well as Lucene and Nutch), the name comes from:

The name my kid gave a stuffed yellow elephant. Short, relatively easy to spell and pronounce, meaningless, and not used elsewhere: those are my naming criteria. Kids are good at generating such. Googol is a kid's term.

An interesting way to name projects - how do you choose names?

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