This paper presents an initial study where the creation of a high-dimensional index is made parallel and distributed by using the Hadoop framework. Early experimental results show substantial performance gains, despite the fact that the Hadoop framework is loosely coupled to the C++ based index creation. Two main lessons can be drawn from this work: (i)~it is key to invest time, energy and manpower to re-implement the code in Java in order to benefit from all the features of Hadoop---although our results are already impressive, even better performance gains will be observed if the index creation is re-implemented in Java; and (ii)~special care must be taken to account for the networking topology to prevent message exchanges from becoming the new bottleneck, when parallelism fixes the CPU bottleneck and HDFS the I/O bottleneck.