Accelerating Spatial Data Processing with MapReduce

Abstract—MapReduce is a key-value based programming model and an associated implementation for processing large data sets. It has been adopted in various scenarios and seems promising. However, when spatial computation is expressed straightforward by this key-value based model, difficulties arise due to unfit features and performance degradation. In this paper, we present methods as follows: 1) a splitting method for balancing workload, 2) pending file structure and redundant data partition dealing with relation between spatial objects, 3) a strip-based two-direction plane sweep-ing algorithm for computation accelerating. Based on these methods, ANN(All nearest neighbors) query and astronomical cross-certification are developed. Performance evaluation shows that the MapReduce-based spatial applications outperform the traditional one on DBMS

Enhancing SpatialHadoop with Closest Pair Queries

Given two datasets P and Q, the K Closest Pair Query (KCPQ) finds the K closest pairs of objects from P ×Q. It is an operation widely adopted by many spatial and GIS applications. As a combination of the K Nearest Neighbor (KNN) and the spatial join queries, KCPQ is an expensive operation. Given the increasing volume of spatial data, it is difficult to perform a KCPQ on a centralized machine efficiently. For this reason, this paper addresses the problem of computing the KCPQ on big spatial datasets in SpatialHadoop, an extension of Hadoop that supports spatial operations efficiently, and proposes a novel algorithm in SpatialHadoop to perform efficient parallel KCPQ on large-scale spatial datasets. We have evaluated the performance of the algorithm in several situations with big synthetic and real-world datasets. The experiments have demonstrated the efficiency and scalability of our proposal