"In Pandas, the only change we need to make to our code, compared to a local filesystem, is to replace open_file(..) with h.open_file(..), where h is a file handle to HDFS/HopsFS."
HopsFS is a drop-in replacement for HDFS. Here's some more details on native HDFS connectors in Python by Wes McKinney -http://wesmckinney.com/blog/python-hdfs-interfaces/