Java or Python distributed compute job (on a student budget)?
Speak with the IT dept at your school (especially if you are in college), if it is for an assignment or research I bet they would be more than happy to give you more disk space.
I have a large dataset (c. 40G) that I want to use for some NLP (largely embarrassingly parallel) over a couple of computers in the lab, to which i do not have root access, and only 1G of user space.
I experimented with hadoop, but of course this was dead in the water-- the data is stored on an external usb hard drive, and i cant load it on to the dfs because of the 1G user space cap. 
I have been looking into a couple of python based options (as I'd rather use NLTK instead of Java's lingpipe if I can help it), and it seems distributed compute options look like:

Ipython
DISCO

After my hadoop experience, i am trying to make sure i try and make an informed choice -- any help on what might be more appropriate would be greatly appreciated.
Amazon's EC2 etc not really an option, as i have next to no budget.