Programming Abstractions for Data Intensive Computing on Clouds and Grids

MapReduce has emerged as an important data-parallel programming model for data-intensive computing - for Clouds and Grids. However most if not all implementations of MapReduce are coupled to a specific infrastructure. SAGA is a high-level programming interface which provides the ability to create distributed applications in an infrastructure independent way. In this paper, we show how MapReduce has been implemented using SAGA and demonstrate its interoperability across different distributed platforms - Grids, Cloud-like infrastructure and Clouds. We discuss the advantages of programmatically developing MapReduce using SAGA, by demonstrating that the SAGA-based implementation is infrastructure independent whilst still providing control over the deployment, distribution and runtime decomposition. The ability to control the distribution and placement of the computation units (workers) is critical in order to implement the ability to move computational work to the data. This is required to keep data network transfer low and in the case of commercial Clouds the monetary cost of computing the solution low. Using data-sets of size up to 10GB, and upto 10 workers, we provide detailed performance analysis of the SAGA-MapReduce implementation, and show how controllingthe distribution of computation and the payload per worker helps enhance performance.