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by throwaways885 2072 days ago
MapReduce, GFS and Bigtable are the foundations of big data today.
2 comments

Those are good engineering efforts, but its like building a bridge vs understanding the theory of gravity.

They are definitely not foundational in anywhere near the sense that bell labs was.

Maybe Bell Labs was only foundational due to timing?
None of those things are new or interesting. Maps were used in the 70s and you can find a chapter about them being parrapalized in Kthuths original Art of Computer Programming.
The original TOACP makes no mention of map parallelization.

https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Art_of_Computer_Pro...

Nor the second one:

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Art_of_Computer_Program...

Nor the third one:

https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Art_of_Computer_Pro...

I also searched for "parallel" and couldn't find any relevant passages to map parallelization.