Amazon on Thursday announced a new cloud computing service that uses Hadoop, a free software framework, to crunch tons of data.
The service, called Amazon Elastic MapReduce, is designed for businesses, researchers and analysts trying to conduct data intensive number crunching.
Amazon’s Hadoop framework runs on the company’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3).
The general idea is that customers can use MapReduce to pay by the sip as they do things like index the Web, mine data, conduct financial analysis, simulation and bioinformatics research.