To most people who use MapReduce in a cluster: You probably don't need to use MapReduce. You are either vastly overstating the amount of data you are dealing wi

To most people who use MapReduce in a cluster: You probably don't need to use MapReduce. You are either vastly overstating the amount of data you are dealing with and the complexity of what you need to do with that data, or you are vastly understating the amount of computational power a single node actually has. Either way, see how fast you can do it on a single machine before trying to run it on a cluster.