Once upon a time, I called Google's MapReduce capability a force multiplier. Looks like the militia are going to get this capability sooner rather than later.
Doug Cutting, of Lucene and Nutch fame, along with Mike Cafarella and Andrzej Bialecki are developing Hadoop. Java based, Hadoop is open source, large scale, distributed computing infrastructure, including a MapReduce implementation on the come.
[Via Tim Bray]