Several people have already noted that Google has published updated statistics on MapReduce in a recent article published in the Communications of the ACM.
While numbers from Google are certainly always interesting, what struck me was the absolutely pathetic quality of the graphs in the article. To see what I mean, check out the graphs on Page 5 (you need an ACM account to get the PDF I think). They are hardly readable, both in print and on screen (zooming in doesn't help). Here is a screenshot (I have included some of the surrounding text to give you an idea of the resolution):
As a member of the academic community, I'm quite disappointed and surprised that neither the authors, nor the editors took note of such an obvious shortcoming. MapReduce is great work, and a publication like CACM reaches out to a much broader audience than the conference proceedings of OSDI (where MapReduce was originally published) so I would expect the presentation to be top-notch (and remember, this is Google we're talking about). Besides, what irks me most is that these are the exact same graphs (or at least some of them are) from the original MapReduce paper (pdf here). Was is so hard to just copy paste or import the figures without messing up the resolution so bad?
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New MapReduce article in CACM
Several people have already noted that Google has published updated statistics on MapReduce in a recent article published in the Communications of the ACM.
While numbers from Google are certainly always interesting, what struck me was the absolutely pathetic quality of the graphs in the article. To see what I mean, check out the graphs on Page 5 (you need an ACM account to get the PDF I think). They are hardly readable, both in print and on screen (zooming in doesn't help). Here is a screenshot (I have included some of the surrounding text to give you an idea of the resolution):
As a member of the academic community, I'm quite disappointed and surprised that neither the authors, nor the editors took note of such an obvious shortcoming. MapReduce is great work, and a publication like CACM reaches out to a much broader audience than the conference proceedings of OSDI (where MapReduce was originally published) so I would expect the presentation to be top-notch (and remember, this is Google we're talking about). Besides, what irks me most is that these are the exact same graphs (or at least some of them are) from the original MapReduce paper (pdf here). Was is so hard to just copy paste or import the figures without messing up the resolution so bad?