As you work on your final projects for the course, we will look at a few research papers in operating systems. This is an opportunity to identify important issues and creative approaches to those issues in the research community, but also a chance to see how systems work is motivated, presented, and evaluated. Please answer each of the questions below after reading the MapReduce paper linked on the course schedule page.
In 3–5 sentences, describe the problem the authors are trying to solve and the approach they took to solve it. You cannot include all the detail in the paper, so identify the key insights that you believe are critically important to the authors’ approach.
Given your understanding of the system and its evaluation, what are the positive and negative attributes of this approach? Describe at least four points, with at least one negative and one positive.
You should focus on strengths and weaknesses in the system the authors describe, their general approach, the evaluation, limitations of the work, or broader applications that you think may be possible. This is an evaluation of the work, not the paper; that means issues with spelling, grammar, or technical language are not directly relevant to this question.
Include at least two questions about this work that go beyond basic technical content of the paper; think about uses of the system, motivations for the work, or other questions that are likely to lead to useful discussion.