Apache Hama is a pure BSP (Bulk Synchronous Parallel) computing framework on top of HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) for massive scientific computations such as matrix, graph and network algorithms.
Why Hama and BSP?
Today, many practical data processing applications require a more flexible programming abstraction model that is compatible to run on highly scalable and massive data systems (e.g., HDFS, HBase, etc). A message passing paradigm beyond Map-Reduce framework would increase its flexibility in its communication capability. Bulk Synchronous Parallel (BSP) model fills the bill appropriately. Some of its significant advantages over MapReduce and MPI are:
- Supports message passing paradigm style of application development
- Provides a flexible, simple, and easy-to-use small APIs
- Enables to perform better than MPI for communication-intensive applications
- Guarantees impossibility of deadlocks or collisions in the communication mechanisms
Source: The Apache Hama Project
