MapReduce alternatives

Question

Are there any alternative paradigms to MapReduce (Google, Hadoop)? Is there any other reasonable way how to split & merge big problems?

Answer 1

Update (August 2014): Stratosphere is now called Apache Flink (incubating).

Have a look at Stratosphere. It is another Big Data runtime that offers more operators (map, reduce, join, union, cross, iterate, ...). It also allows to define advanced data flow graphs (with Hadoop MR, you would have to chain jobs).

Stratosphere also supports BSP with its graph processing abstraction (called Spargel).

If you like to read scientific papers, have a look at Nephele/PACTs: A Programming Model and Execution Framework for Web-Scale Analytical Processing, it explains the theoretical backgrounds of the system.

Another system in the field is Spark which has its own model (RDDs). Since BSP has been mentioned here, also have a look at GraphLab, the offer an alternative to BSP.