This chapter describes what's Hama and how to download and install the Hama.

1.1 Introduction

oday, 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. Apache Hama's Bulk Synchronous Parallel model fills the bill appropriately. Some of its significant advantages over MapReduce and MPI are as following:

• 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.