Piccolo (not this or this) is a system for distributed computing, Piccolo is a new data-centric programming model for writing parallel in-memory applications in data centers. Unlike existing data-flow models, Piccolo allows computation running on different machines to share distributed, mutable state via a key-value table interface. Traditional data-centric models (such as Hadoop) which present the user a single object at a time to operate on, Piccolo exposes a global table interface which is available to all parts of the computation simultaneously. This allows users to specify programs in an intuitive manner very similar to that of writing programs for a single machine.

Using an in-memory key-value store is a very different approach from the canonical map-reduce, which is based on using distributed file systems. The results are impressive:

Experiments have shown that Piccolo is fast and pro-vides excellent scaling for many applications. The performance of PageRank and k-means on Piccolo is 11×and 4× faster than that of Hadoop. Computing a PageR-ank iteration for a 1 billion-page web graph takes only 70 seconds on 100 EC2 instances. Our distributed webcrawler can easily saturate a 100 Mbps internet uplink when running on 12 machines.

Piccolo was presented at OSDI10. For the paper take a look at Piccolo: Building Fast, Distributed Programs with Partitioned Tables, here's the slide deck, and there's a video of the talk (very good).