Even with a cursory introduction to “Big Data”, you will likely see some mention of MapReduce. It provides the framework to Hadoop which in turn has been used (with some modifications) by many applications such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Yahoo. MapReduce is a programming model that actually abstracts the complexities of parallel computing and allows users to tap into the power without having to get into the low level architecture. I covered this in my Data Science class and was surprised at how easy it was to pick up. So I copied what they did in Python and created a MapReduce emulator in R.
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