Hadoop is an open-source software framework for distributed storage and processing of large datasets across clusters of computers using simple programming models. It allows users to write programs that process vast amounts of data in parallel by breaking the computations into small sub-problems, each of which can be solved in a separate processing unit and then combining the results. The key aspects are MapReduce, which splits the workload into mapping and reducing functions, and the distributed file system, which stores data across clusters and allows processing to be parallelized.