The Family of MapReduce and Large Scale Data Processing Systems

In the last two decades, the continuous increase of computational power has produced an overwhelming flow of data which has called for a paradigm shift in the computing architecture and large scale data processing mechanisms. MapReduce is a simple and powerful programming model that enables easy development of scalable parallel applications to process vast amounts of data on large clusters of commodity machines. It isolates the application from the details of running a distributed program such as issues on data distribution, scheduling and fault tolerance. However, the original implementation of the MapReduce framework had some limitations that have been tackled by many research efforts in several followup works after its introduction. This article provides a comprehensive survey for a family of approaches and mechanisms of large scale data processing mechanisms that have been implemented based on the original idea of the MapReduce framework and are currently gaining a lot of momentum in both research and industrial communities. We also cover a set of introduced systems that have been implemented to provide declarative programming interfaces on top of the MapReduce framework. In addition, we review several large scale data processing systems that resemble some of the ideas of the MapReduce framework for different purposes and application scenarios. Finally, we discuss some of the future research directions for implementing the next generation of MapReduce-like solutions.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1105.4252 by other author

Partout: A Distributed Engine for Efficient RDF Processing

The increasing interest in Semantic Web technologies has led not only to a rapid growth of semantic data on the Web but also to an increasing number of backend applications with already more than a trillion triples in some cases. Confronted with such huge amounts of data and the future growth, existing state-of-the-art systems for storing RDF and processing SPARQL queries are no longer sufficient. In this paper, we introduce Partout, a distributed engine for efficient RDF processing in a cluster of machines. We propose an effective approach for fragmenting RDF data sets based on a query log, allocating the fragments to nodes in a cluster, and finding the optimal configuration. Partout can efficiently handle updates and its query optimizer produces efficient query execution plans for ad-hoc SPARQL queries. Our experiments show the superiority of our approach to state-of-the-art approaches for partitioning and distributed SPARQL query processing

A Nine Month Progress Report on an Investigation into Mechanisms for Improving Triple Store Performance

This report considers the requirement for fast, efficient, and scalable triple stores as part of the effort to produce the Semantic Web. It summarises relevant information in the major background field of Database Management Systems (DBMS), and provides an overview of the techniques currently in use amongst the triple store community. The report concludes that for individuals and organisations to be willing to provide large amounts of information as openly-accessible nodes on the Semantic Web, storage and querying of the data must be cheaper and faster than it is currently. Experiences from the DBMS field can be used to maximise triple store performance, and suggestions are provided for lines of investigation in areas of storage, indexing, and query optimisation. Finally, work packages are provided describing expected timetables for further study of these topics

Avalanche: putting the spirit of the web back into semantic web querying

Traditionally Semantic Web applications either included a web crawler or relied on external services to gain access to the Web of Data. Recent efforts have enabled applications to query the entire Semantic Web for up-to-date results. Such approaches are based on either centralized indexing of semantically annotated metadata or link traversal and URI dereferencing as in the case of Linked Open Data. By making limiting assumptions about the information space, they violate the openness principle of the Web - a key factor for its ongoing success. In this article we propose a technique called Avalanche, designed to allow a data surfer to query the Semantic Web transparently without making any prior assumptions about the distribution of the data - thus adhering to the openness criteria. Specifically, Avalanche can perform "live" (SPARQL) queries over the Web of Data. First, it gets on-line statistical information about the data distribution, as well as bandwidth availability. Then, it plans and executes the query in a distributed manner trying to quickly provide first answers. The main contribution of this paper is the presentation of this open and distributed SPARQL querying approach. Furthermore, we propose to extend the query planning algorithm with qualitative statistical information. We empirically evaluate Avalanche using a realistic dataset, show its strengths but also point out the challenges that still exist