Data-intensive applications are nowadays, widely used in various domains to extract and process information, to design complex systems, to perform simulations of real models, etc. These applications exhibit challenging requirements in terms of both storage and computation. Specialized abstractions like Google’s MapReduce were developed to efficiently manage the workloads of data-intensive applications. The MapReduce abstraction has revolutionized the data-intensive community and has rapidly spread to various research and production areas. An open-source implementation of Google's abstraction was provided by Yahoo! through the Hadoop project. This framework is considered the reference MapReduce implementation and is currently heavily used for various purposes and on several infrastructures. To achieve high-performance MapReduce processing, we propose a concurrency-optimized file system for MapReduce Frameworks. As a starting point, we rely on BlobSeer, a framework that was designed as a solution to the challenge of efficiently storing data generated by data-intensive applications running at large scales. We have built the BlobSeer File System (BSFS), with the goal of providing high throughput under heavy concurrency to MapReduce applications. We also study several aspects related to intermediate data management in MapReduce frameworks. We investigate the requirements of MapReduce intermediate data at two levels: inside the same job, and during the execution of pipeline applications. Finally, we show how BSFS can enable extensions to the de facto MapReduce implementation, Hadoop, such as the support for the append operation. This work also comprises the evaluation and the obtained results in the context of grid and cloud environments.
