Atlas record: https://www.aitimeline.dev/en/events/evt-0250/
Research · December 2004
MapReduce
Dean and Ghemawat reduced distributed computation to two functions and hid all the complexity of failures and work distribution inside the system.
Why it matters
Processing data across a thousand machines became available to a programmer who knows nothing about distributed systems.
The programmer writes only the transformation of each record and the reduction of results; splitting, restarting after failures and balancing are the system's business. The model's restrictiveness proved its advantage: a very large share of real tasks fits inside it. In 2006 Hadoop gave an open implementation, and the scheme became an industry standard for a decade.
Event record
- Event date
- December 2004
- Timeline date
- Event date
- Verification
- Sources gathered automatically · September 17, 2026
- Lines
- ID
- evt-0250
Presented at the OSDI symposium in December 2004.
Related events
Earlier
Later
- Extends Apache Hadoop 2006links to this record
An open implementation of the scheme Google described two years earlier.
- Related The unreasonable effectiveness of data 2009
The practical way of processing the volumes the data-effectiveness thesis rests on.
- Related Apache Spark 2012links to this record
The same distributed processing model, now suited to iterative algorithms.