Google's Epic Graph Cruncher Mimicked with Open Source

Unlike Facebook or Yahoo!, Google is loath to open source its back-end software. For many, this is a sore point, as the search giant has built its famously distributed infrastructure atop countless open source tools fashioned outside the walls of the Googleplex. But Mountain View does give back in less-direct ways.

In some cases, Google will publish research papers describing one of the proprietary platforms driving its back end, and to a certain degree this allows outside developers to mimic these platforms with open source projects. Google papers on its GFS distributed file system and MapReduce distributed number-crunching platform, for example, gave rise to the open source Hadoop, and a paper on its BigTable distributed database sparked the open source HBase project.

Now, much the same thing has happened with Google Pregel, Mountain View's platform for processing enormous online graphs, such as a map of the web itself, or of a social network, graphing relationships between people. This week, a Texas startup known as Ravel unveiled an open source project based on Google's 2010 paper describing Pregel. Open sourced under an Apache license at GitHub, the project is dubbed GoldenOrb.