When you hear the expression "big data," the next word you will often hear is "Hadoop." That's because the underlying technology that has made massive amounts of data accessible is based on the open source Apache Hadoop project. From the outside looking in, you would rightly assume then that Hadoop is big data and vice versa; that without one the other cannot be. But there is a Hadoop competitor that in many ways is more mature and enterprise-ready: High Performance Computing Cluster.