Interview Questions and Multiple Choice Questions and Answers

HADOOP MAPREDUCE

Hadoop Map-Reduce is a software framework for easily writing applications which process vast amounts of data (multi-terabyte data-sets) in-parallel on large clusters (thousands of nodes) of commodity hardware in a reliable, fault-tolerant manner.
A Map-Reduce job usually splits the input data-set into independent chunks which are processed by the map tasks in a completely parallel manner. The framework sorts the outputs of the maps, which are then input to the reduce tasks. Typically both the input and the output of the job are stored in a file-system. The framework takes care of scheduling tasks, monitoring them and re-executes the failed tasks.
Typically the compute nodes and the storage nodes are the same, that is, the Map-Reduce framework and the Distributed FileSystem are running on the same set of nodes.
This configuration allows the framework to effectively schedule tasks on the nodes where data is already present, resulting in very high aggregate bandwidth across the cluster.
A MapReduce job is a unit of work that the client wants to be performed: it consists of the input data, the MapReduce program, and configuration information. Hadoop runs the job by dividing it into tasks, of which there are two types: map tasks and reduce tasks.
There are two types of nodes that control the job execution process: a jobtracker and a number of tasktrackers. The jobtracker coordinates all the jobs run on the system by scheduling tasks to run on tasktrackers. Tasktrackers run tasks and send progress reports to the jobtracker, which keeps a record of the overall progress of each job. If a tasks fails, the jobtracker can reschedule it on a different tasktracker. Hadoop divides the input to a MapReduce job into fixed-size pieces called input splits, or just splits.
Hadoop creates one map task for each split, which runs the userdefined map function for each record in the split.

Having many splits means the time taken to process each split is small compared to the time to process the whole input. So if we are processing the splits in parallel, the processing is better load-balanced if the splits are small, since a faster machine will be able to process proportionally more splits over the course of the job than a slower machine. Even if the machines are identical, failed processes or other jobs running concurrently make load balancing desirable, and the quality of the load balancing increases as the splits become more fine-grained. On the other hand, if splits are too small, then the overhead of managing the splits and of map task creation begins to dominate the total job execution time. For most jobs, a good split size tends to be the
size of a HDFS block, 64 MB by default, although this can be changed for the cluster (for all newly created files), or specified when each file is created. Hadoop does its best to run the map task on a node where the input data resides in HDFS. This is called the data locality optimization. It should now be clear why the optimal split size is the same as the block size: it is the largest size of input that can be guaranteed to be stored on a single node.
If the split spanned two blocks, it would be unlikely that any HDFS node stored both blocks, so some of the split would have to be transferred across the network to the node running the map task, which is clearly less efficient than running the whole map task using local data. Map tasks write their output to local disk, not to HDFS. Map output is intermediate output: it’s processed by reduce tasks to produce the final output, and
once the job is complete the map output can be thrown away. So storing it in HDFS, with replication, would be overkill. If the node running the map task fails before the map output has been consumed by the reduce task, then Hadoop will automatically rerun the map task on another node to recreate the map output. Reduce tasks don’t have the advantage of data locality the input to a single reduce task is normally the output from
all mappers. In the present example, we have a single reduce task that is fed by all of the map tasks.

Therefore the sorted map outputs have to be transferred across the network to the node where the reduce task is running, where they are merged and then passed to the user-defined reduce function. The output of the reduce is normally stored in HDFS for reliability. For each HDFS block of the reduce output, the first replica is stored on the local node, with other replicas being stored on off-rack nodes. Thus, writing the reduce output does consume network bandwidth, but only as much as a normal HDFS write pipeline consume. The dotted boxes in the figure below indicate nodes, the light arrows show data transfers on a node, and the heavy arrows show data transfers between nodes. The number of reduce tasks is not governed by the size of the input, but is specified independently.

MapReduce data flow with a single reduce task
When there are multiple reducers, the map tasks partition their output, each creating one partition for each reduce task. There can be many keys (and their associated values) in each partition, but the records for every key are all in a single partition. The partitioning can be controlled by a user-defined partitioning function, but normally the default partitioner which buckets keys using a hash function works very well. This
diagram makes it clear why the data flow between map and reduce tasks is colloquially known as “the shuffle,” as each reduce task is fed by many map tasks. The shuffle is more complicated than this diagram suggests, and tuning it can have a big impact on job execution time. Finally, it’s also possible to have zero reduce tasks. This can be appropriate when you don’t need the shuffle since the processing can be carried out entirely in parallel.