ReadWriteEnterprise

LexisNexis announced today that it will open-source its High Performance Computing Cluster (HPCC) technology, as well as offer an enterprise version with commercial support. The company is positioning HPCC Systems, developed internally by its Risk Solutions unit, as an alternative to Apache Hadoop. A virtual machine for testing purposes will be available soon, and code will be available in a few weeks.

The Risk Solutions unit, less well known than LexisNexis' legal and media units, was founded 10 years ago. It provides identity verification services to government agencies and private organizations such as banks and insurance companies. According to Armando Escalante, CTO of Risk Solutions, the company started developing HPCC 10 years ago when it found that existing solutions weren't capable of munging large data sets and returning results fast enough.