Win free tickets to Hadoop Summit

Competition The Register is offering readers the chance to win free tickets to Yahoo!'s third annual Hadoop Summit, a one-day Silicon Valley confab dedicated to the open source platform of the moment.

This year's summit kicks off at 8am on June 29 at the Hyatt Regency hotel in Santa Clara, California.

Yahoo! is the largest contributor to Apache Hadoop — the distributed number-crunching platform based on Google's MapReduce — and it's slated to deliver a keynote alongside the likes of Amazon, Facebook, and Cloudera, the Silicon Valley startup that has commercialized Hadoop in Red Hat-like fashion.

Last year's summit brought together several thousand stuffed-elephant heads from across the globe, and given the platform's ever-growing popularity — The New York Times has called it "the Justin Bieber of mega scale data center software" — we can expect even more groupies this time around.

In 2004, Google published a pair of research papers describing its distributed file system, GFS, and its software framework for distributed data-crunching, MapReduce. In short order, Nutch crawler developer Doug Cutting launched an Apache project based on the two papers. He called it Hadoop after his son's yellow stuffed elephant.

The platform now underpins the back-end infrastructure not only at Yahoo! and Facebook, but also the likes of Twitter and even Microsoft. Amazon offers developers a version of Hadoop from its online infrastructure service, EC2.

We have two free Summit tickets to give away, and all you have to do to enter the prize drawing is send an email to hadooptix@theregister.co.uk before 5pm Pacific time on Friday June 4. Mark the subject of the email "Hadoop Summit" and please include your full name and a valid email address. Two lucky winners will be picked from the hat at random, informed by email, and given a link where they can claim their tickets.

Rules

• Deadline for entries is 5pm Pacific on Friday June 4.
• Only one entry per individual. Multiple entries will be trashed.
• Entries must contain the full name of the entrant
• To prevent fraudulent ticket claims, The Register will not publish the winners of this competition until after the winners have claimed their tickets.
• All unsuccessful entries will be deleted after the prize drawing, and details will neither be stored nor passed on to any third party.

Hadoop, there it is. ®

Terms and Conditions

This Competition is open to all readers of The Register aged 18 or over.

The Competition is not open to employees of Yahoo!, Situation Publishing Ltd, their families, or agents. Only one entry is permitted per household. Multiple entries will be disqualified. No cash alternatives will be offered. The prize is subject to availability and if, due to circumstances beyond The Register's control, we are unable to provide the stated prize, an alternative prize of equivalent value will be supplied. The Register will not be liable if the prize does not reach the winner for reasons beyond our control.

Each entrant must supply a valid email address to which a confirmation email will be sent should the entrant's name be drawn. Winners will be notified by email within 3 days of the closing date, and must respond within one week. Winners who do not respond within this time may be disqualified and another winner drawn in their place. The Editor's decision is final, and no correspondence will be entered into. Closing date: 5pm Pacific, Friday, June 4, 2010.

All unsuccessful entries will be deleted after the prize drawing, and details will neither be stored nor passed on to any third party.