# About Hadoop The Apache Hadoop software library is a framework that allows for the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers using simple programming models. It is designed to scale up from single servers to thousands of machines, each offering local computation and storage. Rather than rely on hardware to deliver high-availability, the library itself is designed to detect and handle failures at the application layer, so delivering a highly-available service on top of a cluster of computers, each of which may be prone to failures. A Hadoop platform consists of a Hadoop kernel, a [MapReduce](http://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/MapReduce) model, a distributed file system, and often a number of related projects, such as [Apache Hive](http://hive.apache.org/), [Apache HBase](http://hbase.apache.org/), and others. A Hadoop Distributed File System, commonly referred to as HDFS, is a Java-based, distributed, scalable, and portable file system for the Hadoop framework. --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://docs.pentaho.com/install/9.3-install/use-hadoop-with-pentaho/pentaho-big-data-and-hadoop/about-hadoop.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.