SUMMARY MapReduce frameworks allow programmers to write distributed, data‐parallel programs that operate on multisets. These frameworks offer considerable flexibility to support various kinds of programs and data. To understand the essence of the programming model better and to provide a rigorous foundation for optimizations, we present an abstract, functional model of MapReduce along with a number of customization options. We demonstrate that the MapReduce programming model can also represent programs that operate on lists, which differ from multisets in that the order of elements matters. Along with the functional model, we offer a cost model that allows programmers to estimate and compare the performance of MapReduce programs. Based on the cost model, we introduce two transformation rules aiming at performance optimization of MapReduce programs, which also demonstrates the usefulness of our model. In an exploratory study, we assess the impact of applying these rules to two applications. The functional model and the cost model provide insights at a proper level of abstraction into why the optimization works. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The advent of variability management and generator technology enables users to derive individual variants from a variable code base based on a selection of desired configuration options. This approach gives rise to the generation of possibly billions of variants that, however, cannot be efficiently analyzed for errors with classic analysis techniques. To address this issue, researchers and practitioners usually apply sampling heuristics. While sampling reduces the analysis effort significantly, the information obtained is necessarily incomplete and it is unknown whether sampling heuristics scale to billions of variants. Recently, researchers have begun to develop variability-aware analyses that analyze the variable code base directly exploiting the similarities among individual variants to reduce analysis effort. However, while being promising, so far, variability-aware analyses have been applied mostly only to small academic systems. To learn about the mutual strengths and weaknesses of variability-aware and sampling-based analyses of software systems, we compared the two strategies by means of two concrete analysis implementations (type checking and liveness analysis), applied them to three subject systems: Busybox, the x86 Linux kernel, and OpenSSL. Our key finding is that variability-aware analysis outperforms most sampling heuristics with respect to analysis time while preserving completeness.