Douglass Read Cutting is a software designer, advocate for, and creator of open-source search technology.

[2][3] Prior to developing Lucene, Cutting held search technology positions at Xerox PARC where he worked on the Scatter/Gather algorithm[4][5] and on computational stylistics.

"[9] In December 2004, Google Research published a paper on the MapReduce algorithm, which allows very large-scale computations to be trivially parallelized across large clusters of servers.

Cutting and Mike Cafarella, realizing the importance of this paper to extending Lucene into the realm of extremely large search problems, created the open-source Hadoop framework.

This framework allows applications based on the MapReduce paradigm to be run on large clusters of commodity hardware.