[1] Originally a sub-project of Hadoop,[2] it became an Apache Software Foundation top level project in 2012.

It was created by Edward J. Yoon,[3] who named it (short for "Hadoop Matrix Algebra"),[4] and Hama also means hippopotamus in Yoon's native Korean language (하마),[5] following the trend of naming Apache projects after animals and zoology (such as Apache Pig).

[6] When executing graph algorithms, Hama showed a fifty-fold performance increase relative to Hadoop.

Yoon cited issues of installation, scalability, and a difficult programming model[9] for its lack of adoption.

Groom servers starts up with a BSPPeer instance and a RPC proxy to contact the bsp master.