Emerging sensor networks, more capable instruments, and ever increasing simulation scales are generating data at a rate that exceeds our ability to effectively manage, curate, analyze, and share it. Data-intensive computing is expected to revolutionize the next-generation software stack. Hadoop, an open source implementation of the MapReduce model provides a way for large data volumes to be seamlessly processed through use of large commodity computers. The inherent parallelization, synchronization and fault-tolerance the model offers, makes it ideal for highly-parallel data-intensive applications. MapReduce and Hadoop have traditionally been used for web data processing and only recently been used for scientific applications. There is a limited understanding on the performance characteristics that scientific data intensive applications can obtain from MapReduce and Hadoop. Thus, it is important to evaluate Hadoop specifically for data-intensive scientific operations -- filter, merge and reorder-- to understand its various design considerations and performance trade-offs. In this paper, we evaluate Hadoop for these data operations in the context of High Performance Computing (HPC) environments to understand the impact of the file system, network and programming modes on performance.

MapReduce has become a popular framework for Big Data applications. While MapReduce has received much praise for its scalability and efficiency, it has not been thoroughly evaluated for power consumption. Our goal with this paper is to explore the possibility of scheduling in a power-efficient manner without the need for expensive power monitors on every node. We begin by considering that no cluster is truly homogeneous with respect to energy consumption. From there we develop a MapReduce framework that can evaluate the current status of each node and dynamically react to estimated power usage. Inso doing, we shift power consumption work toward more energy efficient nodes which are currently consuming less power. Our work shows that given an ideal framework configuration, certain nodes may consume only 62.3% of the dynamic power they consumed when the same framework was configured as it would be in a traditional MapReduce implementation.

MapReduce has gradually become the framework of choice for "big data". The MapReduce model allows for efficient and swift processing of large scale data with a cluster of compute nodes. However, the efficiency here comes at a price. The performance of widely used MapReduce implementations such as Hadoop suffers in heterogeneous and load-imbalanced clusters. We show the disparity in performance between homogeneous and heterogeneous clusters in this paper to be high. Subsequently, we present MARLA, a MapReduce framework capable of performing well not only in homogeneous settings, but also when the cluster exhibits heterogeneous properties. We address the problems associated with existing MapReduce implementations affecting cluster heterogeneity, and subsequently present through MARLA the components and trade-offs necessary for better MapReduce performance in heterogeneous cluster and cloud environments. We quantify the performance gains exhibited by our approach against Apache Hadoop and MARIANE in data intensive and compute intensive applications.

MapReduce has since its inception been steadily gaining ground in various scientific disciplines ranging from space exploration to protein folding. The model poses a challenge for a wide range of current and legacy scientific applications for addressing their “Big Data” challenges. For example: MapRe-duce's best known implementation, Apache Hadoop, only offers native support for Java applications. While Hadoop streaming supports applications compiled in a variety of languages such as C, C++, Python and FORTRAN, streaming has shown to be a less efficient MapReduce alternative in terms of performance, and effectiveness. Additionally, Hadoop streaming offers lesser options than its native counterpart, and as such offers less flexibility along with a limited array of features for scientific software. The Hadoop File System (HDFS), a central pillar of Apache Hadoop is not a POSIX compliant file system. In this paper, we present an alternative framework to Hadoop streaming to address the needs of scientific applications: MARISSA (MApReduce Implementation for Streaming Science Applications). We describe MARISSA's design and explain how it expands the scientific applications that can benefit from the MapReduce model. We also compare and explain the performance gains of MARISSA over Hadoop streaming.

Since its introduction, MapReduce implementations have been primarily focused towards static compute cluster sizes. In this paper, we introduce the concept of dynamic elasticity to MapReduce. We present the design decisions and implementation tradeoffs for DELMA, (Dynamically Elastic MapReduce), a framework that follows the MapReduce paradigm, just like Hadoop MapReduce, but that is capable of growing and shrinking its cluster size, as jobs are underway. In our study, we test DELMA in diverse performance scenarios, ranging from diverse node additions to node additions at various points in the application run-time with various dataset sizes. The applicability of the MapReduce paradigm extends far beyond its use with large-scale data intensive applications, and can also be brought to bear in processing long running distributed applications executing on small-sized clusters. In this work, we focus both on the performance of processing hierarchical data in distributed scientific applications, as well as the processing of smaller but demanding input sizes primarily used in small clusters. We run experiments for datasets that require CPU intensive processing, ranging in size from Millions of input data elements to process, up to over half a billion elements, and observe the positive scalability patterns exhibited by the system. We show that for such sizes, performance increases accordingly with data and cluster size increases. We conclude on the benefits of providing MapReduce with the capability of dynamically growing and shrinking its cluster configuration by adding and removing nodes during jobs, and explain the possibilities presented by this model.

MapReduce is increasingly gaining popularity as a programming model for use in large-scale distributed processing. The model is most widely used when implemented using the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). The use of the HDFS, however, precludes the direct applicability of the model to HPC environments, which use high performance distributed file systems. In such distributed environments, the MapReduce model can rarely make use of full resources, as local disks may not be available for data placement on all the nodes. This work proposes a MapReduce implementation and design choices directly suitable for such HPC environments.

Since its inception, MapReduce has frequently been associated with Hadoop and large-scale datasets. Its deployment at Amazon in the cloud, and its applications at Yahoo! and Face book for large-scale distributed document indexing and database building, among other tasks, have thrust MapReduce to the forefront of the data processing application domain. The applicability of the paradigm however extends far beyond its use with data intensive applications and disk based systems, and can also be brought to bear in processing small but CPU intensive distributed applications. In this work, we focus both on the performance of processing large-scale hierarchical data in distributed scientific applications, as well as the processing of smaller but demanding input sizes primarily used in diskless, and memory resident I/O systems. In this paper, we present LEMO-MR (Low overhead, Elastic, configurable for in-Memory applications, and on-Demand fault tolerance), an optimized implementation of MapReduce, for both on-disk and in-memory applications, describe its architecture and identify not only the necessary components of this model, but also trade offs and factors to be considered. We show the efficacy of our implementation in terms of potential speedup that can be achieved for representative data sets used by cloud applications. Finally, we quantify the performance gains exhibited by our MapReduce implementation over Apache Hadoop in a compute intensive environment.