Problem Set 5: MapReduce

Due Thursday November 8, 2012, 11:59pm


Note: Do not change the .mli files!


Part 1: MapReduce (60 points)

In this problem set, you will be implementing a simplified version of Google's MapReduce. Prior to starting this problem set, read the short paper on MapReduce to familiarize yourself with the basic architecture. This writeup will assume that you have read sections 1–3.1 of that paper.

Overview

Map and Reduce Functions

The map and reduce functions have the following OCaml types:

val map : 'a -> 'b -> ('c * 'd) list  
val reduce : 'c -> 'd list -> 'e list

These functions will be computed in a distributed fashion by several agents running concurrently. The agents communicate with each other using a messaging protocol defined in shared/protocol.ml. However, that protocol only allows for the transmission of strings, so you must use OCaml's built-in marshalling and unmarshalling facilities to transmit values of different types. We will explain this more thoroughly below.

For a given MapReduce application foo, the application-specific code is stored in the directory apps/foo/. The code for the mappers is in apps/foo/mapper.ml and the code for the reducers is in apps/foo/reducer.ml. There is also a controller in the file apps/foo/foo.ml to handle the initialization of and communication with the mappers and reducers, reading inputs, and printing results.

The mappers and reducers receive their input by calling Program.get_input and communicate their results by calling Program.set_output. The specific mechanisms for these operations are described below.

Basic Execution

Execution is divided into five phases:

  1. Pre-Map:

    controller.exe is invoked with the name of a MapReduce application on the command line along with other application-specific information (e.g., input file name, any other parameters as required by the application). This information is passed to main method of the controller in the application directory. This method reads the data from the input file and parses it into a list of (key, value) pairs to provide as input to the mappers. It then connects to worker servers and initializes mappers on these servers.

  2. Map

    The controller sends each (key, value) pair to an available mapper. The mapper applies the mapping function on this (key, value) pair, resulting in a list of (key, value) pairs (the types of the input and output do not have to be the same). The resulting list of (key, value) pairs is sent back to the controller. The controller continues to send inputs to the next available mapper until all pairs have been mapped.

  3. Combine

    For each key produced by the mappers, all of its corresponding values are collected into a single list, resulting in a (key, value list) pair for that key.

  4. Reduce

    The controller connects to worker servers and initializes reducers on these servers. The (key, value list) pairs produced in the Combine phase are then sent to available reducers. The reducers perform the reduce operation and send the results back to the controller. This continues until all input has been reduced.

  5. Post-Reduce

    The controller collects the results of the Reduce phase and outputs them in some manner.

Client Execution Example

Consider the canonical MapReduce example of counting the number of occurrences of each word in a set of documents. The input is a set of (document id, body) pairs. In the Map phase, each word that occurs in the body of a file is mapped to the pair (word, "1"), indicating that the word has been seen once. In the Combine phase, all pairs with the same first component are collected to form the pair (word, ["1"; "1"; ...; "1"]), one such pair for each word. Then in the Reduce phase, for each word, the list of ones is summed to determine the number of occurrences of that word.

For simplicity, our framework accepts only a single data file containing all the input documents. Each document is represented in the input file as a (id, document name, body) triple. See data/reuters.txt, a collection of Reuters articles from the 1980's, or the shorter files data/test1.txt and data/test2.txt for an example of the formatting. Map_reduce.map_reduce prepares a document file by first calling Util.load_documents and then formatting the documents into (key, value) pairs for the mapper.

We have included a full implementation of this application in apps/word_count. Here is a detailed explanation of the sequence of events.

  1. The controller application is started using the command controller.exe word_count filename. It immediately calls the main method of apps/word_count/word_count.ml, passing it the argument list. The main method calls controller/Map_reduce.map_reduce, which is common controller code for performing a simple one-phase MapReduce on documents. Other more involved applications have their own controller code.
  2. The documents in filename are read in and parsed using Util.load_documents which splits the collection of documents into {id; title; body} triples. These triples are converted into (id, body) pairs.
  3. The controller calls Map_reduce.map kv_pairs "" "apps/word_count/mapper.ml". The second argument represents shared data that is accessible to all mappers in addition to their input (key, value) pair. For this application, there is no shared data, so this argument is the empty string. In general, the shared data can be accessed by a mapper using Program.get_shared_data().
  4. Map_reduce.map initializes a mapper worker manager using Worker_manager.initialize_mappers "apps/word_count/mapper.ml" "". The Worker_manager loads in the list of available workers from the file named addresses. Each line of this file contains a worker address of the form ip_address:port_number. Each of these workers is sent the mapper code. The worker creates a mapper with that code and and sends back the id of the resulting mapper. This id is combined with the address of the worker to uniquely identify that mapper. If certain workers are unavailable, this function will report this fact, but will continue to run successfully.
  5. Map_reduce.map then sends individual unmapped (id, body) pairs to available mappers until it has received results for all pairs. Free mappers are obtained using Worker_manager.pop_worker(). Mappers should be released once their results have been received using Worker_manager.push_worker. Read controller/worker_manager.mli for more complete documentation. Once all (id, body) pairs have been mapped, the new list of (word, "1") pairs is returned.
  6. Map_reduce.map_reduce receives the results of the mapping. If desired, Util.print_map_results can be called here to display the results of the Map phase for debugging purposes.
  7. The list of (word, "1") pairs is then combined into (word, ["1"; ...; "1"]) pairs for each word by calling Map_reduce.combine. The results can be displayed using Util.print_combine_results.
  8. Map_reduce.reduce is then called with the results of Map_reduce.combine, along with the (empty) shared data string and the name of the reducer file apps/word_count/reducer.ml.
  9. Map_reduce.reduce initializes the reducer worker manager by calling the appropriate Worker_manager function, which retrieves worker addresses in the same manner as for mappers.
  10. Map_reduce.reduce then sends the unreduced (word, count list) pairs to available reducers until it has received results for all input. This is performed in essentially the same manner as the map phase. When all pairs have been reduced, the new list of (word, count) tuples is returned. In this application, the key doesn't change, so Worker_manager.reduce and the reduce workers only calculate and return the new value (in this case, count), instead of returning the key (in this case, word) and count.
  11. The results are returned to the main method of word_count.ml, which displays them using Util.print_reduce_results.

Worker Execution Example

  1. Multiple workers can be run from the same directory as long as they listen on different ports. A worker server is started using worker_server.exe port_number, where port_number is the port the worker listens on.
  2. Worker_server receives a connection and spawns a thread, which calls Worker.handle_request to handle it.
  3. Worker.handle_request determines the request type. If it is an initialization request, then the new mapper or reducer is built using Program.build, which returns either the new worker id or the compilation error. See worker_server/program.ml for more complete documentation. If it is a map or reduce request, the worker id is verified as referencing a valid mapper or reducer, respectively. If the id is valid, then Program.run is called with that id and the provided input. This runs the relevant worker, which receives its input by calling Program.get_input(). Once the worker terminates, having set its output using Program.set_output, these results are returned by Program.run. If the request is invalid, then the appropriate error message, as defined in shared/protocol.ml, is prepared.
  4. Once the results of either the build or map/reduce are completed, then Worker.send_response is called, which is responsible for sending the result back to the client. If the response is sent successfully, then Worker.handle_request simply recurses, otherwise it returns unit.

Code Structure

In this section we describe the organization of the MapReduce code.

controller/

worker_server/


Communication Protocol

The protocol that the controller application and the workers use to communicate is stored in shared/protocol.ml.

Requests

Responses

Marshalling

Only string data can be communicated between agents. Values can be converted to and from strings explicitly using Util.marshal and Util.unmarshal, which call the OCaml built-in Marshal.to_string and Marshal.from_string functions, respectively. You can send strings via communication channels without marshalling, but other values need to be marshalled. Your mapper or reducer must also convert the input it receives from strings back to the appropriate type it can operate on, and once it has finished, it needs to convert its output into strings to communicate it back.

Note that marshalling is not type safe. OCaml cannot detect misuse of marshalled data during compilation. If you unmarshal a string and treat it as a value of any type other than the type it was marshalled as, your program will compile, run, and crash. You should therefore take particular care that the types match when marshalling/unmarshalling. Make sure that the type of marshalled input sent to your mapper matches the type that the mapper expects, and that the type of the marshalled results that the mapper sends back matches the type expected. The same is true for reducers using the reducer messages. Recall the syntax for type annotations:

let x : int = unmarshal my_data
Annotated variable declarations will help pinpoint unmarshalling errors.


Your Tasks

All code you submit must adhere to the specifications defined in the respective .mli files. As always, do not change the .mli files.

You must implement functions in the following files:

Building and running your code

We have provided a Makefile and a build script build.bat that you can use to build your project.

Modules

If you would like to define additional modules, please add them to the appropriate build.bat file or Makefile. You have a great deal of freedom in this assignment. Enjoy it.



Part 2: Using MapReduce (30 points)

You will use the simplified MapReduce that you created in part 1 to implement three applications: inverted_index, page_rank, and nbody.

Each application will require a mapper apps/xxx/mapper.ml and reducer apps/xxx/reducer.ml, where xxx is the name of the application, as well as a controller apps/xxx/xxx.ml. We have supplied a full implementation of the word_count application as an example.

Inverted Index (5 points)

An inverted index is a mapping from words to the documents in which they appear. For example, if these were your documents:

Document 1:

OCaml map reduce

Document 2:
fold filter ocaml
The inverted index would look like this:
worddocument
ocaml1 2
map 1
reduce 1
fold 2
filter 2

Implementation

To implement this application, you should take a dataset of documents (such as data/reuters.txt) as input and use MapReduce to produce an inverted index. This can be done in a way very similar to word_count. In particular, you can use Map_reduce.map_reduce. Print your final results using Util.print_reduce_results.

Your mapper and reducer code should go in apps/inverted_index/mapper.ml and apps/inverted_index/reducer.ml, respectively, and your controller code should go in apps/inverted_index/inverted_index.ml.

Simplified PageRank (10 points)

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm used by Google to weight the importance of different websites on the Internet. You will be implementing a very simplified, iterative version of PageRank. To begin running simplified PageRank, we initialize each website with PageRank of 1/n, where n is the total number of websites. Each step of the iteration has two parts: For each website, we divide its PageRank by the number of links out of it, and send this amount to each website linked to. Then, for all websites, we sum up all values being sent into it, thus obtaining a new PageRank for each website. The number of iterations is supplied on the command line.

For more details on simplified PageRank, see Section 14.3 in Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World by Cornell Professors David Easley and Jon Kleinberg. Note: There is an error in the example on page 408 of the networks book. On the second iteration, page A should have a PageRank of 5/16, not 3/16.

Implementation

Your mapper and reducer code should go in apps/page_rank/mapper.ml and apps/page_rank/reducer.ml, respectively, and your controller code should go in apps/page_rank/page_rank.ml.

In order to simulate websites, we have defined a new type, website. Each line is of the format pageid@pagetitle@links. The field links is of the form out1,out2,...,outm, where each outi is the pageid of a link out of the page. The file data/websites.txt contains the same example as on pages 407 and 408 of the Networks book draft linked above.

After performing PageRank for the specified number of iterations, you should print the final PageRank values. We have provided you with a function Util.print_page_ranks, which takes in a list of tuples of pageids and PageRanks, and prints them to the screen.

Behavior is undefined if any two pages share the same key. Behavior is also undefined if any page has zero outgoing links. However, behavior is defined if a page has zero incoming links: it naturally ends up with zero PageRank. When printing the PageRanks for each page, you must explicitly list that page with a PageRank of zero.

No page will link to another page twice, nor link to a nonexistent page; the outgoing links list for each page will contain unique valid IDs.

N-Body Simulation (15 points)

An n-body simulation models the movement of objects in space due to the gravitational forces acting between them over time. Given a collection of n bodies possessing a mass, location, and velocity, we compute new positions and velocities for each body based on the gravitational forces acting on each. These vectors are then applied to the bodies for a small period of time and then the process repeats, creating a new vector. Tracking the positions of the bodies over time yields a series of frames which, shown in succession, model the bodies' movements across a plane.

The module shared/plane.ml defines representations for scalar values, two-dimensional points, vectors, and common functions such as Euclidean distance. Using Plane, we can define a type that represent the mass, position, and velocity of a body:

  type mass = Plane.scalar
  type location = Plane.point
  type velocity = Plane.vector
  type body = mass * location * velocity
and a function acceration that calculates the acceleration of one body on another:
  val acceleration : body -> body -> Plane.vector

To understand how the acceleration function works, we need to review a few basic facts from physics. Recall that force is equal to mass times acceleration (F = m × a) and the gravitational force between objects with masses m and n separated by distance d is given by (G × m × n) / d² where G is the gravitational constant. Putting these two equations together, and solving for a, we have that the magnitude of the acceleration vector due to gravity for the object with mass n is G × m / d². The direction of the acceleration vector is the same as the direction of the unit vector between the objects. Note that this calculation assumes that the objects do not collide.

Given accelerations for each body, we move the simulation forward one time step, updating the position p and velocity v of each body to p + v + a/2 and v + a respectively, where a is the Plane.vector in the sequence returned by accelerations.

This algorithm fits nicely into the MapReduce framework. Accelerations for each body can be computed and applied in parallel; map across the bodies to get the accelerations on each due to every other body, then apply each acceleration vector to get a new position and velocity for the body.

We have provided implementations of Nbody.main and the IO helper Util.string_of_bodies. Your task is to implement Nbody.make_transcript which will run a simulation for a given number of iterations and generate a textual representation of the bodies over time. This output file can be opened using the supplied viewer bouncy.jar, which displays the simulation:

N-Body GUI
Recall the command to open jar files:

java -jar bouncy.jar
Specifically, make_transcript should take a list of (string * body) pairs, where the string uniquely identifies the dynamic bodies, and an integer steps and update the bodies for steps iterations using the acceleration function described above. Create nbody/mapper.ml and Nbody/reducer.ml to modify the bodies at each step while maintaining the identifier strings. You should document bodies' postions after each update using Util.string_of_bodies and return a complete string once steps updates have occurred.

We have provided sample bodies in shared/simulations.ml. Use these as models to write your own simulations, which you may optionally submit as Simulations.zardoz. Particularly creative submissions may recieve karma.

Acknowledgments

This portion of the assignment is based on materials developed by Dan Licata (Carnegie Mellon University) and Professor David Bindel.

Note that for the above applications, your MapReduce code will probably run a lot slower than a non-MapReduce implementation of the same algorithm. This slowdown is due to the fact that there is a lot of overhead and the simplified MapReduce framework is not very well optimized. Performance gains are only realized when doing this on a massive scale.

To submit

Simply zip up and submit your entire ps5 folder. Be sure to run make clean or manually delete all compiled files (.cm*) and executables first.


Part 3: Source Control (3 points)

You are required to use a source control system like Git or SVN. Submit the log file that describes your activity. We will provide you with an SVN repository, hosted by CSUG, or you may use a private repository from a provider like xp-dev or bitbucket.

For information on how to get started with your provided SVN account, read Using Subversion in the CSUGLab.

Note: Your repository name is cs3110_<netid(s)>. For example, cs3110_njl36, or if you have a partner: cs3110_dck10_njl36. Notice that the netids of groups are in alphabetical order. This repository name is what you put in place of project1 in the directions in the provided link.

If you use Windows, and are unfamiliar with the command line or Cygwin, there is a GUI based SVN client called Tortoise SVN that provides convenient context menu access to your repo.

For Debian/Ubuntu, a GUI-based solution to explore would be Rapid SVN. To install:

apt-get install rapidsvn

Mac users looking into a front-end can try SC Plugin, which claims to provide similar functionality to Tortoise. Rapid SVN might work as well.

There is also a plug-in for Eclipse called Subclipse that integrates everything for you nicely.

Note that all of these options are simply graphical mimics of the extremely powerful terminal commands, and are by no means necessary to successfully utilize version control.


Part 4: Design Review Meeting (7 points)

We will be holding 15-minute design review meetings. Your group is expected to meet with one of the course staff during their office hours to discuss this assignment. A sign-up schedule is available on CMS.

Be prepared to give a short presentation on how you and your partner plan to implement MapReduce, including how you will divide the work, and bring any questions you may have concerning the assignment. Staff members will ask questions to gauge your understanding of varying aspects of the assignment, ranging from the high-level outline to specific design pitfalls. This is not a quiz; you are not expected to be familiar with the intricacies of the project during your design review. Rather, you are expected to have outlined your design and prepared thoughtful questions. Your design review should focus on your approach to Part 1, but you may spend a few minutes at the end on Part 2.

Design reviews are for your benefit. Meet with your partner prior to the review and spend time outlining and implementing MapReduce. This is a large and difficult assignment. The review is an opportunity to ensure your group understands the assignment and has a feasible design early on.