And here's a lead from Tim at Acunu -- an interesting paper about an interesting alternate distributed computing framework called Ciel: http://www.usenix.org/event/nsdi11/tech/full_papers/Murray.pdf
They mention they ported k-means clustering from Mahout (among other things) as a benchmark to show how a different framework can run some things better than Hadoop. I don't think it's a criticism of Hadoop -- it's used for things it was not designed for, and its nature can't be ideal for all problems. Definitely an interesting though exercise for those of us deep into thinking how Hadoop does! Sean
