Preparation for MapReduce recitation

• Read MapReduce.
• Skip sections 4 and 7.

This paper was published at the biennial Usenix Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI) in 2004, one of the premier conferences in computer systems. (OSDI alternates with the equally prestigious ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), at which appeared Eraser, the paper you already read in a previous recitation.)

Answer the following questions and bring your answers to recitation:

• What exactly would happen if one block of one hard drive got erased during a map/reduce computation? What parts of the system would fix the error (if any), and what parts of the system would be oblivious (if any)?
• How do "stragglers" impact performance?

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