Amazon (s AMZN) today said it would bring web-scale computing power for use in workloads such as web indexing and data mining to just about anyone. The bookseller now offers MapReduce (a programming model created by Google (s GOOG) to help deal with incredibly large data sets) using Hadoop on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud and Simple Storage Service. This allows AWS customers to access the power of a Google- or Yahoo-style server and programming infrastructure to model business decisions and analyze huges sets of customer or corporate data without having to invest in thousands of servers (as well as dozens of programmers). Dana Gardner over at ZDNet says one could think of it as having access to a personal supercomputer.
