While reading across the internet I came across Microsoft’s version to MapReduce called Dryad- which has been around for some time, but has not generated quite the buzz that Hadoop or MapReduce are doing.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/dryadlinq/

DryadLINQ

DryadLINQ is a simple, powerful, and elegant programming environment for writing large-scale data parallel applications running on large PC clusters.

Overview

New! An academic release of Dryad/DryadLINQ is now available for public download.

The goal of DryadLINQ is to make distributed computing on large compute cluster simple enough for every programmers. DryadLINQ combines two important pieces of Microsoft technology: the Dryad distributed execution engine and the .NET Language Integrated Query (LINQ).

Dryad provides reliable, distributed computing on thousands of servers for large-scale data parallel applications. LINQ enables developers to write and debug their applications in a SQL-like query language, relying on the entire .NET library and using Visual Studio.

DryadLINQ translates LINQ programs into distributed Dryad computations:

• C# and LINQ data objects become distributed partitioned files.
• LINQ queries become distributed Dryad jobs.
• C# methods become code running on the vertices of a Dryad job.

DryadLINQ has the following features:

• Declarative programming: computations are expressed in a high-level language similar to SQL
• Automatic parallelization: from sequential declarative code the DryadLINQ compiler generates highly parallel query plans spanning large computer clusters. For exploiting multi-core parallelism on each machine DryadLINQ relies on the PLINQ parallelization framework.
• Integration with Visual Studio: programmers in DryadLINQ take advantage of the comprehensive VS set of tools: Intellisense, code refactoring, integrated debugging, build, source code management.
• Integration with .Net: all .Net libraries, including Visual Basic, and dynamic languages are available.

and

Conciseness: the following line of code is a complete implementation of the Map-Reduce computation framework in DryadLINQ:

public static IQueryable<R>
MapReduce<S,M,K,R>(this IQueryable<S> source,
Expression<Func<S,IEnumerable<M>>> mapper,
Expression<Func<M,K>> keySelector,
Expression<Func<K,IEnumerable<M>,R>> reducer)
{
return source.SelectMany(mapper).GroupBy(keySelector, reducer);
}

and http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/dryad/

Dryad

The Dryad Project is investigating programming models for writing parallel and distributed programs to scale from a small cluster to a large data-center.

Overview

New! An academic release of DryadLINQ is now available for public download.

Dryad is an infrastructure which allows a programmer to use the resources of a computer cluster or a data center for running data-parallel programs. A Dryad programmer can use thousands of machines, each of them with multiple processors or cores, without knowing anything about concurrent programming.

The Structure of Dryad Jobs

A Dryad programmer writes several sequential programs and connects them using one-way channels. The computation is structured as a directed graph: programs are graph vertices, while the channels are graph edges. A Dryad job is a graph generator which can synthesize any directed acyclic graph. These graphs can even change during execution, in response to important events in the computation.

Dryad is quite expressive. It completely subsumes other computation frameworks, such as Google’s map-reduce, or the relational algebra. Moreover, Dryad handles job creation and management, resource management, job monitoring and visualization, fault tolerance, re-execution, scheduling, and accounting.

The Dryad Software Stack

As a proof of Dryad’s versatility, a rich software ecosystem has been built on top Dryad:

• SSIS on Dryad executes many instances of SQL server, each in a separate Dryad vertex, taking advantage of Dryad’s fault tolerance and scheduling. This system is currently deployed in a live production system as part of one of Microsoft’s AdCenter log processing pipelines.
• DryadLINQ generates Dryad computations from the LINQ Language-Integrated Query extensions to C#.
• The distributed shell is a generalization of the pipe concept from the Unix shell in three ways. If Unix pipes allow the construction of one-dimensional (1-D) process structures, the distributed shell allows the programmer to build 2-D structures in a scripting language. The distributed shell generalizes Unix pipes in three ways:
  1. It allows processes to easily connect multiple file descriptors of each process — hence the 2-D aspect.
  2. It allows the construction of pipes spanning multiple machines, across a cluster.
  3. It virtualizes the pipelines, allowing the execution of pipelines with many more processes than available machines, by time-multiplexing processors and buffering results.
• Several languages are compiled to distributed shell processes. PSQL is an early version, recently replaced with Scope.

Publications

Dryad: Distributed Data-Parallel Programs from Sequential Building Blocks
Michael Isard, Mihai Budiu, Yuan Yu, Andrew Birrell, and Dennis Fetterly
European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys), Lisbon, Portugal, March 21-23, 2007

Video of a presentation on Dryad at the Google Campus, given by Michael Isard, Nov 1, 2007.

Also interesting to read-

Why does Dryad use a DAG?

he basic computational model we decided to adopt for Dryad is the directed-acyclic graph (DAG). Each node in the graph is a computation, and each edge in the graph is a stream of data traveling in the direction of the edge. The amount of data on any given edge is assumed to be finite, the computations are assumed to be deterministic, and the inputs are assumed to be immutable. This isn’t by any means a new way of structuring a distributed computation (for example Condor had DAGMan long before Dryad came along), but it seemed like a sweet spot in the design space given our other constraints.

So, why is this a sweet spot? A DAG is very convenient because it induces an ordering on the nodes in the graph. That makes it easy to design scheduling policies, since you can define a node to be ready when its inputs are available, and at any time you can choose to schedule as many ready nodes as you like in whatever order you like, and as long as you always have at least one scheduled you will continue to make progress and never deadlock. It also makes fault-tolerance easy, since given our determinism and immutability assumptions you can backtrack as far as you want in the DAG and re-execute as many nodes as you like to regenerate intermediate data that has been lost or is unavailable due to cluster failures.

from

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dryad/archive/2010/07/23/why-does-dryad-use-a-dag.aspx