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Mapreduce - Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
The map and reduce steps
MapReduce is a framework for processing highly distributable problems across huge datasets using a large number of computers (nodes), collectively referred to as a cluster (if all nodes use the same hardware) or a grid (if the nodes use different hardware). Computational processing can occur on data stored either in a filesystem (unstructured) or in a database (structured).
"Map" step: The master node takes the input, divides it into smaller sub-problems, and distributes them to worker nodes. A worker node may do this again in turn, leading to a multi-level tree structure. The worker node processes the smaller problem, and passes the answer back to its master node.
"Reduce" step: The master node then collects the answers to all the sub-problems and combines them in some way to form the output – the answer to the problem it was originally trying to solve.