I am involved in some Hadoop deployments and there is a very interesting possiblity for Pharo in that ecosystem.
Namely, there is a YARN thing in there which is a scheduler for distributing computing on a cluster of nodes.
It is possible to deploy all kinds of technologies on the nodes (e.g. Python, R, Java) and Pharo images and VM (in headless mode) could be deployed as well.
There is also an Hadoop component named ZooKeeper that focuses on acting as a distributed configuration repository.
Given the fact that we also can use some Java calls (using the JNI module with 32-bits Java), we can integrate well enough on YARN I'd say.
There is also another project which is very nice and this is SLIDER (on YARN).
First step here would be to have a basic YARN-Pharo application and a PoC for talking to ZooKeeper.
This would open interesting gates for Pharo given its strengths.
Even more when we'll get a 64-bit VM.
What is cool with Pharo is that an image can be very small and self containing vs Java application (which have tons of Jar files attached).
Access to the data on the HDFS thing can happen through NFSv3 so, we can go that route.
Tell me what you think!
Phil