We have a large dataset to analyze with multiple reduce functions.
All reduce algorithm work on the same dataset generated by the same map function. Reading the large dataset costs too much to do it every time, it would be better to read only once and pass the mapped data to multiple reduce functions.
Can I do this with Hadoop? I've searched the examples and the intarweb but I could not find any solutions.
Maybe a simple solution would be to write a job that doesn't have a reduce function. So you would pass all the mapped data directly to the output of the job. You just set the number of reducers to zero for the job.
Then you would write a job for each different reduce function that works on that data. This would mean storing all the mapped data on the HDFS though.
Another alternative might be to combine all your reduce functions into a single Reducer which outputs to multiple files, using a different output for each different function. Multiple outputs are mentioned in this article for hadoop 0.19. I'm pretty sure that this feature is broken in the new mapreduce API released with 0.20.1, but you can still use it in the older mapred API.
Are you expecting every reducer to work on exactly same mapped data? But at least the "key" should be different since it decides which reducer to go.
You can write an output for multiple times in mapper, and output as key (where $i is for the i-th reducer, and $key is your original key). And you need to add a "Partitioner" to make sure these n records are distributed in reducers, based on $i. Then using "GroupingComparator" to group records by original $key.
It's possible to do that, but not in trivial way in one MR.
You may use composite keys. Let's say you need two kinds of the reducers, 'R1' and 'R2'. Add ids for these as a prefix to your o/p keys in the mapper. So, in the mapper, a key 'K' now becomes 'R1:K' or 'R2:K'.
Then, in the reducer, pass values to implementations of R1 or R2 based on the prefix.
I guess you want to run different reducers in a chain. In hadoop 'multiple reducers' means running multiple instances of the same reducer. I would propose you run one reducer at a time, providing trivial map function for all of them except the first one. To minimize time for data transfer, you can use compression.
Of course you can define multiple reducers. For the Job (Hadoop 0.20) just add:
job.setNumReduceTasks(<number>);
But. Your infrastructure has to support the multiple reducers, meaning that you have to
have more than one cpu available
adjust mapred.tasktracker.reduce.tasks.maximum in mapred-site.xml accordingly
And of course your job has to match some specifications. Without knowing what you exactly want to do, I only can give broad tips:
the keymap-output have either to be partitionable by %numreducers OR you have to define your own partitioner:
job.setPartitionerClass(...)
for example with a random-partitioner ...
the data must be reduce-able in the partitioned format ... (references needed?)
You'll get multiple output files, one for each reducer. If you want a sorted output, you have to add another job reading all files (multiple map-tasks this time ...) and writing them sorted with only one reducer ...
Have a look too at the Combiner-Class, which is the local Reducer. It means that you can aggregate (reduce) already in memory over partial data emitted by map.
Very nice example is the WordCount-Example. Map emits each word as key and its count as 1: (word, 1). The Combiner gets partial data from map, emits (, ) locally. The Reducer does exactly the same, but now some (Combined) wordcounts are already >1. Saves bandwith.
I still dont get your problem you can use following sequence:
database-->map-->reduce(use cat or None depending on requirement)
then store the data representation you have extracted.
if you are saying that it is small enough to fit in memory then storing it on disk shouldnt be an issue.
Also your use of MapReduce paradigm for the given problem is incorrect, using a single map function and multiple "different" reduce function makes no sense, it shows that you are just using map to pass out data to different machines to do different things. you dont require hadoop or any other special architecture for that.
Related
I don't see a value for the reducers in Hadoop in the following scenario:
The Map Tasks generate unique keys (Because we can merge both the Map/Reduce functionality together)
The output size of the Map Tasks is too big (This will exhaust the memory if we wait for the reducers to begin the work)
If we have any functionality that doesn't need grouping and sorting of the keys
Please correct me if I am wrong.
And if someone could give me a real example of the benefits of the reducers and when it should be used, I will appreciate it.
Reducer is beneficial (or required) when you need to do operations like aggregation/grouping etc..
FYI : Reducer is meant for grouping different value for a key which comes from different mapper. So for a use case which do not require grouping/aggregation then there is no point of using reducer(you can set it to Zero , meaning Map-Only jobs).
One quick use-case i can think of is - you want to randomly split a big file to multiple part file. In this case you will supply big file (lets say 100G) to Map-Only jobs. All maps will read a chunk of file and write as a part of file.
Are there any real life good use cases/examples for jobs which only involve only Map tasks and no reducers. A job which only triggers mappers and no reducers need to be set.
I have done many Map-Only Jobs.... here are a few examples.
You have a classification model that you build every day, and you need to classify all your data with that classifier. There is no need for a reduce, you just load the classifier from the distributed cache (or from a remote resource like a DB) and inside the map() function of your mapper you do the classification and write the result somewhere.
Performing data cleanup on something like an HBase table. Read in each row in your mapper, and if it matches some conditional statement then delete it. No need for reduce here.
Basically, if you don't need to combine or aggregate data, you just need to perform a repetitive serial process on each piece of data, you don't usually need a reducer. I would also say that if you don't need a reducer, then you might ask yourself if you might be better off with something like Apache Storm or another processing model with less overhead.
Sure!
Imagine that instead of the famous word-count problem, you simply replace each word by its length.
Doing so, you map each word to its length and you never reduce anything!
Hello map reduce would become 5 3 6
As we know, that during the shuffle phase of hadoop, each of the reducer read data from all the mapper's output (intermedia data).
Now, we also know that by default Hash-Partitioning is used for reducers.
My question is: How do we implement an algorithm, e.g. Locality-aware?
In short, you should not do it.
First, you have no control over where the mappers and reducers are executed on the cluster, so even when the complete output of a single mapper will go to a single reducer there is a huge probability that they would be on different hosts and the data would be transferred through the network
Second, to make the reducer process the whole output of the mapper, you first have to make mapper process the right part of the information, which means that you have to preprocess data by partitioning it and then run a single mapper and a single reducer for each partition, but this preprocessing itself would take much resources so it is mostly meaningless
And finally, why do you need it? The main concept of map-reduce is manipulation with key-value pairs, and reducer in general should aggregate list of values outputted by the mappers for the same keys. Here's why hash partitioning is used: distribute N keys between K reducers. Using different type of partitioner is a really seldom case. If you need data locality you might prefer to work with MPP database rather than Hadoop, for example.
If you really need a custom partitioner, here's an example of how it can be implemented: http://hadooptutorial.wikispaces.com/Custom+partitioner. Nothing special, just return reducer number based on the key and value passed and the number of reducers. Using hash code of the host name divided (%) by the number of reducers will make the whole output of a single mapper go to a single reducer. Also you might use process PID % number of reducers. But before doing this you have to check, whether you really need this behavior or not.
One of the big benefits of Hadoop MapReduce is the fact that Map processes take place on the same machine that the data they operate upon resides (to the extent possible). But can this be or is this perhaps already true of the Reduce side? For example, in the extreme case of a Map-only job, all of the output data ends up on the same machine as the corresponding input data (right?). But in an intermediate case in which the output is somewhat correlated with the output, it seems reasonable to partition the output and to the extent possible keep it on same machine at it started on.
Is this possible? Does this already happen?
Inputs to the Reducers can reside on any node(local or remote) and not necessarily on the same machine where they are running. As Mappers complete their output gets written onto the local FS of the machine where they are running. Once this is done the intermediate output is needed by the machines that are about to run the reduce task. One thing to note here is that all the values corresponding to a particular key go the same reducer. So, it's not always possible that the input to Reducers is local, since different sets of key/value pairs are processed by different Mappers running on different machines.
Now, before the Mapper output is sent to Reducers for further processing, the data is partitioned based on keys and each partition goes to a Reducer and all the key/value pairs in that partition get processed by that Reducer. During the process a lot of data shuffling takes place. So it's not possible to maintain the data locality in case of Reducers.
Hope this answers the question.
If you know that the data for a particular reducer is already on the right node after the map phase, and the algorithm allows for it (see this blog post about it) you should insert your reducer as a combiner. Combiners are like miniature reducers that only get to see co-located data. Often you can dramatically improve performance because the combiner output can be orders of magnitude smaller than the map output, so what's left to shuffle is trivial.
Of course, if indeed the map phase leaves your data already correctly partitioned, why use a reducer at all? Why not create a second map job that simulates a reducer?
I know that during the intermediate steps between mapper and reducer, hadoop will sort and partition the data on its way to the reducer.
Since I am dealing with already partitioned data in my input to the mapper, is there a way to take advantage of it and possibly accelerate the intermediate processing so no more sorting or grouping-by will take place?
Adding some details:
As I store data on S3, let's say I only have two files in my bucket. First file will store records of the lower half users ids, the other file will store values of the upper half of user ids. Data in each file is not necessarily sorted, but it is guaranteed that all data pertaining to a user is located in the same file.
Such as:
\mybucket\file1
\mybucket\file2
File1 content:
User1,ValueX
User3,ValueY
User1,ValueZ
User1,ValueAZ
File2 content:
User9,ValueD
User7,ValueB
User7,ValueD
User8,ValueB
From what I read, I can use a streaming job and two mappers and each mapper will suck in one of the two files, but the whole file. Is this true?
Next,
Let's say the mapper will only output a unique Key just once, with the associated value being the number of occurrences of that Key. (which I realize it is more of a reducer responsibility, but just for our example here)
Can the sorting and partitioning of those output keys from the Mapper be disabled and let them fly freely to the reducer(s) ?
Or to give another example:
Imagine all my input data contains just one line for each Unique Key, and I don't need that data to be sorted in the final output of the reducer. I just want to Hash the Value for each Key. Can I disable that sorting and partitioning step before the reducer?
Although for the files shown above you'll get 2 mappers, it can't be guaranteed always. Number of mappers depend upon the number of InputSplits created from the input data. If your files are big you might have more than one mappers.
Partitioning is merely a way to tell which key/value goes to which reducer. If you disable it then you either need some other way to do this or you'll end up with performance degradation, as the inputs to reducers will be uneven. A particular reducer might get all of the input or a particular reducer might get zero input. I can't see any performance gain here. Of course, if you think your custom partitioner fits better into the situation you could definitely do that. But skipping partitioning doesn't sound logical to me. The default partitioning behavior depends on hash itself. After a mapper emits its output keys are hashed to find out which set of key/value pairs goes to which reducer.
And if your data is already sorted and you want to skip the sorting phase in your MR job, you might find the patch provided in response to this JIRA useful. Issue is not closed yet, but it would definitely help you in getting started.
HTH