MapReduce talk by Dr Jimmy Lin
Dr. Jimmy Lin, associate professor at the University of Maryland gave a lecture in Amsterdam on Friday about Hadoop MapReduce. Dr. Lin was invited to the Science Park by BiG Grid – the Dutch NGI – and by the Amsterdam Information Retrieval community (AIR). Despite Friday was the submission deadline of the EGI Community Forum I decided to take a break from writing and listen to the talk. (BREAKING: Community Forum submission deadline has been extended until Wednesday!)
I was sure I would hear a good lecture. Jimmy Lin is the author of a book I recently read about MapReduce and he has been working with MapReduce applications at Maryland and at Twitter for several years. What I did not know is that he has excellent presentation skill and very powerful slides. In one hour I not only learnt what MapReduce is and what it can and cannot be used for, but I also learnt how Google translate works and how the problem of DNA sequencing could be translated to the problem of shredding sentences of a Dickens book. On top of that the lecture was followed by a visit to the data centre of SARA, member of the Dutch NGI, operating an impressive number of clusters and a tape robot in the Science Park. So let’s see what really happened in one hour.
Complete EGI blog
Author: Gergely Sipos, Senior User Community Support Officer
Source: www.egi.eu, 5 December 2011
