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ZDnet, By Mary Jo Foley | November 16, 2011
Just a month after insisting there was still a place for its own Hadoop competitor, Microsoft off
icials have decided to
discontinue work on LINQ to HPC, codenamed "Dryad."
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."
Dryad was supposed to provide a way for running big-data jobs across clusters of Windows servers. It was designed to provide a platform for developers to build applications that can process large amounts of unstructured data. Just a month ago, Microsoft updated its near-final test build of Dryad.
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.
Read more.