What is Map/Reduce?

Question

I hear a lot about map/reduce, especially in the context of Google\'s massively parallel compute system. What exactly is it?

Answer 1

After getting most frustrated with either very long waffley or very short vague blog posts I eventually discovered this very good rigorous concise paper.

Then I went ahead and made it more concise by translating into Scala, where I've provided the simplest case where a user simply just specifies the map and reduce parts of the application. In Hadoop/Spark, strictly speaking, a more complex model of programming is employed that require the user to explicitly specify 4 more functions outlined here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MapReduce#Dataflow

import scalaz.syntax.id._

trait MapReduceModel {
  type MultiSet[T] = Iterable[T]

  // `map` must be a pure function
  def mapPhase[K1, K2, V1, V2](map: ((K1, V1)) => MultiSet[(K2, V2)])
                              (data: MultiSet[(K1, V1)]): MultiSet[(K2, V2)] = 
    data.flatMap(map)

  def shufflePhase[K2, V2](mappedData: MultiSet[(K2, V2)]): Map[K2, MultiSet[V2]] =
    mappedData.groupBy(_._1).mapValues(_.map(_._2))

  // `reduce` must be a monoid
  def reducePhase[K2, V2, V3](reduce: ((K2, MultiSet[V2])) => MultiSet[(K2, V3)])
                             (shuffledData: Map[K2, MultiSet[V2]]): MultiSet[V3] =
    shuffledData.flatMap(reduce).map(_._2)

  def mapReduce[K1, K2, V1, V2, V3](data: MultiSet[(K1, V1)])
                                   (map: ((K1, V1)) => MultiSet[(K2, V2)])
                                   (reduce: ((K2, MultiSet[V2])) => MultiSet[(K2, V3)]): MultiSet[V3] =
    mapPhase(map)(data) |> shufflePhase |> reducePhase(reduce)
}

// Kinda how MapReduce works in Hadoop and Spark except `.par` would ensure 1 element gets a process/thread on a cluster
// Furthermore, the splitting here won't enforce any kind of balance and is quite unnecessary anyway as one would expect
// it to already be splitted on HDFS - i.e. the filename would constitute K1
// The shuffle phase will also be parallelized, and use the same partition as the map phase.  
abstract class ParMapReduce(mapParNum: Int, reduceParNum: Int) extends MapReduceModel {
  def split[T](splitNum: Int)(data: MultiSet[T]): Set[MultiSet[T]]

  override def mapPhase[K1, K2, V1, V2](map: ((K1, V1)) => MultiSet[(K2, V2)])
                                       (data: MultiSet[(K1, V1)]): MultiSet[(K2, V2)] = {
    val groupedByKey = data.groupBy(_._1).map(_._2)
    groupedByKey.flatMap(split(mapParNum / groupedByKey.size + 1))
    .par.flatMap(_.map(map)).flatten.toList
  }

  override def reducePhase[K2, V2, V3](reduce: ((K2, MultiSet[V2])) => MultiSet[(K2, V3)])
                             (shuffledData: Map[K2, MultiSet[V2]]): MultiSet[V3] =
    shuffledData.map(g => split(reduceParNum / shuffledData.size + 1)(g._2).map((g._1, _)))
    .par.flatMap(_.map(reduce))
    .flatten.map(_._2).toList
}