I was thinking research in Hadoop is actively pursued by the "BIG" cloud companies, but the academia is lagging behind may be because of the infrastructure for testing the implementations..
In our Laboratory for Decision Technologies (LATITUDE), at the University of Brasilia - Brazil, we have been working on a hadoop based scheme for collecting and preprocessing data related to security incidents that are detected by many heterogeneous and distributed sources in a network, including operating systems, honeypots, intrusion detection systems, applications, acces control systems, key distributiion systems, etc. This data arise in great volume, from different sources, with various formats and meanings, so it represents a challege to be processed real time so as to give comprehensive indicators for taking decisions regarding network security measures and reactions against attacks.
In our LATITUDE lab we have a computer clustter with 48 nodes for testing the implementations.