Kahn Process Networks are a Flexible Alternative to MapReduce

Experience has shown that development using shared-memory concurrency, the prevalent parallel programming paradigm today, is hard and synchronization primitives nonintuitive because they are low-level and inherently nondeterministic. To help developers, we propose Kahn process networks, which are based on message-passing and shared-nothing model, as a simple and flexible tool for modeling parallel applications. We argue that they are more flexbile than MapReduce, which is widely recognized for its efficiency and simplicity. Nevertheless, Kahn process networks are equally intuitive to use, and, indeed, MapReduce is implementable as a Kahn process network. Our presented benchmarks (word count and k-means) show that a Kahn process network framework permits alternative implementations that bring significant performance advantages: the two

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: HPCC
• Authors: Zeljko Vrba, Pål Halvorsen, Carsten Griwodz, Paul B. Beskow
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, HPCC 2009, Kahn Process Network, Prevalent Parallel Programming, Process Network Framework