Lecture on Cluster Computing and MapReduce from Google

For a while I was curious on what was MapReduce exactly and if even you are curious these lectures from Google will help

http://code.google.com/edu/submissions/mapreduce-minilecture/listing.html

So far I took the first and the second one.Both are approx an hour long.

The first one gives an overview of distributed computing and it's history.

• Difference between parallel computing and distributed computing
• Synchronization primitives and Semaphores
• Condition variables
• Fundamentals of Networking (what is a port, TCP, IP etc)

The second lecture goes into details of Map Reduce

• Overview of Functional Programming
• What is Map and Fold in the context of Functional Programming
• Overview of MapReduce with the example of a word count on a bunch of files Algorithm

I started writing a very basic MapReduce implementation in Java (using regular Threads of course to parallelize the Mappers and Reducers) for the Word Count Algorithm.I have about 50% completed and hopefully will complete it all tomorrow and post the code out here.