DistOS 2014W Lecture 21

Presentation

Marking

• marked mostly on presentation, not content
• basically we want to communicate the basic structure of the paper, and do so in a way that isn't boring

Content

• concrete, not "head in the clouds"
• present the area
• compare and contrast the papers
• 10 minutes talk, 5 minutes feedback
• basic argument
• basic references

Form

• show the work we've done on paper
• try to get feedback
• think of it as a rough draft
• try to get people to read the paper
• enthusiasm
• powerpoints are easier
• don't read slides
• no whole sentences on slides
• look at talks by Mark Shuttleworth

MapReduce

A clever observation that a simple solution could solve most distributed problems. It's all about programming to an abstraction that is efficiently parallelizable. Note that it's not actually a simple solution, because it sits atop a mountain of code. It requires something like BigTables which requires something like GFS, which requires something like Chubby.

Naiad

Where MapReduce was suited for a specific family of solutions, Naiad tries to generalize the solution to apply parallelization to a much wider family. Naiad supports MapReduce style solutions, but also many other solutions. However, the tradeoff was simplicity. It's like we took MapReduce and took away its low barrier to entry. The idea is to create a constrained graph that can easily be parallelized.