Hadoop MapReduce in Action

MultiTech
10 min readNov 25, 2020

--

Hadoop MapReduce (Hadoop Map/Reduce) is a software framework for distributed processing of large data sets on compute clusters of commodity hardware. It is a sub-project of the Apache Hadoop project. The framework takes care of scheduling tasks, monitoring them and re-executing any failed tasks.

According to The Apache Software Foundation, the primary objective of Map/Reduce is to split the input data set into independent chunks that are processed in a completely parallel manner. The Hadoop MapReduce 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 Map function divides the input into ranges by the InputFormat and creates a map task for each range in the input. The JobTracker distributes those tasks to the worker nodes. The output of each map task is partitioned into a group of key-value pairs for each reduce.

The Reduce function then collects the various results and combines them to answer the larger problem that the master node needs to solve. Each reduce pulls the relevant partition from the machines where the maps executed, then writes its output back into HDFS. Thus, the reduce is able to collect the data from all of the maps for the keys and combine them to solve the problem,More info go through big data online course

Map Reduce Job

The top level unit of work in MapReduce is a job. A job usually has a map and a reduce phase, though the reduce phase can be omitted. For example, consider a MapReduce job that counts the number of times each word is used across a set of documents. The map phase counts the words in each document, then the reduce phase aggregates the per-document data into word counts spanning the entire collection.

During the map phase, the input data is divided into input splits for analysis by map tasks running in parallel across the Hadoop cluster. By default, the MapReduce framework gets input data from the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS).

The reduce phase uses results from map tasks as input to a set of parallel reduce tasks. The reduce tasks consolidate the data into final results. By default, the MapReduce framework stores results in HDFS.

Although the reduce phase depends on output from the map phase, map and reduce processing is not necessarily sequential. That is, reduce tasks can begin as soon as any map task completes. It is not necessary for all map tasks to complete before any reduce task can begin.

MapReduce operates on key-value pairs. Conceptually, a MapReduce job takes a set of input key-value pairs and produces a set of output key-value pairs by passing the data through map and reduce functions. The map tasks produce an intermediate set of key-value pairs that the reduce tasks uses as input. The diagram below illustrates the progression from input key-value pairs to output key-value pairs at a high level:

Though each set of key-value pairs is homogeneous, the key-value pairs in each step need not have the same type. For example, the key-value pairs in the input set (KV1) can be (string, string) pairs, with the map phase producing (string, integer) pairs as intermediate results (KV2), and the reduce phase producing (integer, string) pairs for the final results (KV3).

The keys in the map output pairs need not be unique. Between the map processing and the reduce processing, a shuffle step sorts all map output values with the same key into a single reduce input (key, value-list) pair, where the 'value' is a list of all values sharing the same key. Thus, the input to a reduce task is actually a set of (key, value-list) pairs.

The key and value types at each stage determine the interfaces to your map and reduce functions. Therefore, before coding a job, determine the data types needed at each stage in the map-reduce process. For example:

  1. Choose the reduce output key and value types that best represents the desired outcome.
  2. Choose the map input key and value types best suited to represent the input data from which to derive the final result.
  3. Determine the transformation necessary to get from the map input to the reduce output, and choose the intermediate map output/reduce input key value type to match.

Control MapReduce job characteristics through configuration properties. The job configuration specifies:

  • how to gather input
  • the types of the input and output key-value pairs for each stage
  • the map and reduce functions
  • how and where to store the final results

Example: Calculating Word Occurrences

This example demonstrates the basic MapReduce concept by calculating the number of occurrence of each each word in a set of text files. For an in-depth discussion and source code for an equivalent example, see the Hadoop MapReduce tutorial at:

http://hadoop.apache.org/mapreduce/docs/current/mapred_tutorial.html

Recall that MapReduce input data is divided into input splits, and the splits are further divided into input key-value pairs. In this example, the input data set is the two documents, document1 and document2. The InputFormat subclass divides the data set into one split per document, for a total of 2 splits:

A (line number, text) key-value pair is generated for each line in an input document. The map function discards the line number and produces a per-line (word, count) pair for each word in the input line. The reduce phase produces (word, count) pairs representing aggregated word counts across all the input documents.

Given the input data shown above, the map-reduce progression for the example job is:

The output from the map phase contains multiple key-value pairs with the same key: The ‘oats’ and ‘eat’ keys appear twice. Recall that the MapReduce framework consolidates all values with the same key before entering the reduce phase, so the input to reduce is actually (key, values) pairs. Therefore, the full progression from map output, through reduce, to final results is:

Understanding the MapReduce Job Life Cycle

This section briefly sketches the life cycle of a MapReduce job and the roles of the primary actors in the life cycle. The full life cycle is much more complex. For details, refer to the documentation for your Hadoop distribution or the Apache Hadoop MapReduce documentation.

Though other configurations are possible, a common Hadoop cluster configuration is a single master node where the Job Tracker runs, and multiple worker nodes, each running a Task Tracker. The Job Tracker node can also be a worker node.

When the user submits a MapReduce job to Hadoop:

  1. The local Job Client prepares the job for submission and hands it off to the Job Tracker.
  2. The Job Tracker schedules the job and distributes the map work among the Task Trackers for parallel processing.
  3. Each Task Tracker spawns a Map Task. The Job Tracker receives progress information from the Task Trackers.
  4. As map results become available, the Job Tracker distributes the reduce work among the Task Trackers for parallel processing.
  5. Each Task Tracker spawns a Reduce Task to perform the work. The Job Tracker receives progress information from the Task Trackers.

All map tasks do not have to complete before reduce tasks begin running. Reduce tasks can begin as soon as map tasks begin completing. Thus, the map and reduce steps often overlap.

Job Client

The Job Client prepares a job for execution.When you submit a MapReduce job to Hadoop, the local JobClient:

  1. Validates the job configuration.
  2. Generates the input splits.
  3. Copies the job resources (configuration, job JAR file, input splits) to a shared location, such as an HDFS directory, where it is accessible to the Job Tracker and Task Trackers.
  4. Submits the job to the Job Tracker.

Job Tracker

The Job Tracker is responsible for scheduling jobs, dividing a job into map and reduce tasks, distributing map and reduce tasks among worker nodes, task failure recovery, and tracking the job status. Job scheduling and failure recovery are not discussed here; see the documentation for your Hadoop distribution or the Apache Hadoop MapReduce documentation.

When preparing to run a job, the Job Tracker:

  1. Fetches input splits from the shared location where the Job Client placed the information.
  2. Creates a map task for each split.
  3. Assigns each map task to a Task Tracker (worker node).

The Job Tracker monitors the health of the Task Trackers and the progress of the job. As map tasks complete and results become available, the Job Tracker:

  1. Creates reduce tasks up to the maximum enableed by the job configuration.
  2. Assigns each map result partition to a reduce task.
  3. Assigns each reduce task to a Task Tracker.

A job is complete when all map and reduce tasks successfully complete, or, if there is no reduce step, when all map tasks successfully complete.

Task Tracker

A Task Tracker manages the tasks of one worker node and reports status to the Job Tracker. Often, the Task Tracker runs on the associated worker node, but it is not required to be on the same host.

When the Job Tracker assigns a map or reduce task to a Task Tracker, the Task Tracker:

  1. Fetches job resources locally.
  2. Spawns a child JVM on the worker node to execute the map or reduce task.
  3. Reports status to the Job Tracker.

The task spawned by the Task Tracker runs the job’s map or reduce functions.

Map Task

The Hadoop MapReduce framework creates a map task to process each input split. The map task:

  1. Uses the InputFormat to fetch the input data locally and create input key-value pairs.
  2. Applies the job-supplied map function to each key-value pair.
  3. Performs local sorting and aggregation of the results.
  4. If the job includes a Combiner, runs the Combiner for further aggregation.
  5. Stores the results locally, in memory and on the local file system.
  6. Communicates progress and status to the Task Tracker.

Map task results undergo a local sort by key to prepare the data for consumption by reduce tasks. If a Combiner is configured for the job, it also runs in the map task. ACombiner consolidates the data in an application-specific way, reducing the amount of data that must be transferred to reduce tasks. For example, a Combiner might compute a local maximum value for a key and discard the rest of the values. The details of how map tasks manage, sort, and shuffle results are not covered here. See the documentation for your Hadoop distribution or the Apache Hadoop MapReduce documentation.

When a map task notifies the Task Tracker of completion, the Task Tracker notifies the Job Tracker. The Job Tracker then makes the results available to reduce tasks.

Reduce Task

The reduce phase aggregates the results from the map phase into final results. Usually, the final result set is smaller than the input set, but this is application dependent. The reduction is carried out by parallel reduce tasks. The reduce input keys and values need not have the same type as the output keys and values.

The reduce phase is optional. You may configure a job to stop after the map phase completes.

Reduce is carried out in three phases, copy, sort, and merge. A reduce task:

  1. Fetches job resources locally.
  2. Enters the copy phase to fetch local copies of all the assigned map results from the map worker nodes.
  3. When the copy phase completes, executes the sort phase to merge the copied results into a single sorted set of (key, value-list) pairs.
  4. When the sort phase completes, executes the reduce phase, invoking the job-supplied reduce function on each (key, value-list) pair.
  5. Saves the final results to the output destination, such as HDFS.

The input to a reduce function is key-value pairs where the value is a list of values sharing the same key. For example, if one map task produces a key-value pair ('eat', 2)and another map task produces the pair ('eat', 1), then these pairs are consolidated into ('eat', (2, 1)) for input to the reduce function. If the purpose of the reduce phase is to compute a sum of all the values for each key, then the final output key-value pair for this input is ('eat', 3).

Reduce tasks use an OutputFormat subclass to record results. The Hadoop API provides OutputFormat subclasses for using HDFS as the output destination. T

How Hadoop Partitions Map Input Data

When you submit a job, the MapReduce framework divides the input data set into chunks called splits using the org.apache.hadoop.mapreduce.InputFormat subclass supplied in the job configuration. Splits are created by the local Job Client and included in the job information made available to the Job Tracker.

The JobTracker creates a map task for each split. Each map task uses a RecordReader provided by the InputFormat subclass to transform the split into input key-value pairs. The diagram below shows how the input data is broken down for analysis during the map phase:

The Hadoop API provides InputFormat subclasses for using HDFS as an input source.

To learn complete big data course visit ITGuru’s big data hadoop training Blog

--

--