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I have a general question to the MAP/Reduce Framework.

I have a task, which can be separated into several partitions. For each partition, I need to run a computation intensive algorithm.

Then, according to the MAP/Reduce Framework, it seems that I have two choices:

Run the algorithm in the Map stage, so that in the reduce stage, there is no work needed to be done, except collect the results of each partition from the Map stage and do summarization

In the Map stage, just divide and send the partitions (with data) to the reduce stage. In the reduce stage, run the algorithm first, and then collect and summarize the results from each partitions.

Correct me if I misunderstand.

I am a beginner. I may not understand the MAP/Reduce very well. I only have basic parallel computing concept.

Phani Rahul
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lserlohn
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2 Answers2

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You're actually really confused. In a broad and general sense, the map portion takes the task and divides it among some n many nodes or so. Those n nodes that receive a fraction of the whole task do something with their piece. When finished computing some steps on their data, the reduce operation reassembles the data.

The REAL power of map-reduce is how scalable it is.

Given a dataset D running on a map-reduce cluster m with n nodes under it, each node is mapped 1/D pieces of the task. Then the cluster m with n nodes reduces those pieces into a single element. Now, take a node q to be a cluster n with p nodes under it. If m assigns q 1/D, q can map 1/D to (1/D)/p with respect to n. Then n's nodes can reduce the data back to q where q can supply its data to its neighbors for m.

Make sense?

alvonellos
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  • Thanks for your answer. I get more clear. If my understanding is right, Map/Reduce is focus on how to divide /distribute the partitions and how to summarize the results from different partitions. Is that right? So in which stage that " Those n nodes that receive a fraction of the whole task do something with their piece. ", what does this stage called? Thanks. – lserlohn Jul 06 '14 at 01:34
  • I found a better answer, see this link: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28982/please-explain-mapreduce-simply – alvonellos Jul 06 '14 at 16:52
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In MapReduce, you have a Mapper and a Reducer. You also have a Partitioner and a Combiner.

Hadoop is a distributed file system that partitions(or splits, you might say) the file into blocks of BLOCK SIZE. These partitioned blocks are places on different nodes. So, when a job is submitted to the MapReduce Framework, it divides that job such that there is a Mapper for every input split(for now lets say it is the partitioned block). Since, these blocks are distributed onto different nodes, these Mappers also run on different nodes.

In the Map stage,

  1. The file is divided into records by the RecordReader, the definition of record is controlled by InputFormat that we choose. Every record is a key-value pair.
  2. The map() of our Mapper is run for every such record. The output of this step is again in key-value pairs
  3. The output of our Mapper is partitioned using the Partitioner that we provide, or the default HashPartitioner. Here in this step, by partitioning, I mean deciding which key and its corresponding values go to which Reducer(if there is only one Reducer, its of no use anyway)
  4. Optionally, you can also combine/minimize the output that is being sent to the reducer. You can use a Combiner to do that. Note that, the framework does not guarantee the number of times a Combiner will be called. It is only part of optimization.

This is where your algorithm on the data is usually written. Since these tasks run in parallel, it makes a good candidate for computation intensive tasks.

After all the Mappers complete running on all nodes, the intermediate data i.e the data at end of Map stage is copied to their corresponding reducer.

In the Reduce stage, the reduce() of our Reducer is run on each record of data from the Mappers. Here the record comprises of a key and its corresponding values, not necessarily just one value. This is where you generally run your summarization/aggregation logic.

When you write your MapReduce job you usually think about what can be done on each record of data in both the Mapper and Reducer. A MapReduce program can just contain a Mapper with map() implemented and a Reducer with reduce() implemented. This way you can focus more on what you want to do with the data and not bother about parallelizing. You don't have to worry about how the job is split, the framework does that for you. However, you will have to learn about it sooner or later.

I would suggest you to go through Apache's MapReduce tutorial or Yahoo's Hadoop tutorial for a good overview. I personally like yahoo's explanation of Hadoop but Apache's details are good and their explanation using word count program is very nice and intuitive.

Also, for

I have a task, which can be separated into several partitions. For each partition, I need to run a computing intensive algorithm.

Hadoop distributed file system has data split onto multiple nodes and map reduce framework assigns a task to every every split. So, in hadoop, the process goes and executes where the data resides. You cannot define the number of map tasks to run, data does. You can however, specify/control the number of reduce tasks.

I hope I have comprehensively answered your question.

Phani Rahul
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