Large scale machine learning - Python or Java?
I think one big thing Java has going for it is Hadoop. If you really mean large scale, you'll want to be able to use something like that. Generally speaking Java has the performance advantage, and more libraries available. So: Java.
I am currently embarking on a project that will involve crawling and processing huge amounts of data (hundreds of gigs), and also mining them for extracting structured data, named entity recognition, deduplication, classification etc. 
I'm familiar with ML tools from both Java and the Python world: Lingpipe, Mahout, NLTK, etc. However, when it comes down to picking a platform for such a large scale problem - I lack sufficient experience to decide between Java or Python.
I know this sounds like a vague question, and but I am looking for general advice on picking either Java or Python. The JVM offers better performance(?) over Python, but are libraries like Lingpipe etc. match up with the Python ecosystem? If I went this Python, how easy would it be scaling it and managing it across multiple machines etc.
Which one should I go with and why?