The Dryad and DryadLINQ systems offer a new programming model for large scale data-parallel computing. They generalize previous execution environments such as SQL and MapReduce in three ways: by providing a general-purpose distributed execution engine for data-parallel applications; by adopting an expressive data model of strongly typed .NET objects; and by supporting general-purpose imperative and declarative operations on datasets within a traditional high-level programming language. A DryadLINQ program is a sequential program composed of LINQ expressions performing arbitrary side-effect-free operations on datasets, and can be written and debugged using standard .NET development tools. The DryadLINQ system automatically and transparently translates the data-parallel portions of the program into a distributed execution plan which is passed to the Dryad execution platform. Dryad, which has been in continuous operation for several years on production clusters made up of thousands of co...