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There is map-reduce the algorithm, and then there is map-reduce the distributed computing mechanism. Unfortunately they share a name, but Google engineers defin

• acdha 13y ago
  They most certainly did not, any more than Apple invented the smartphone — the core algorithm would have been familiar to a mainframe COBOL programmer, after all, and the distributed aspect was common under other names in scientific computing or relational databases. I'd be somewhat surprised if they didn't first hear about it at some place like Stanford and realize how promise there was in a cleaner, less crufty implementation than the various HPC job schedulers or hacked-up shell scripts managed by hapless grad-students around the world. None of the above is intended to diminish their achievements: in fact, I think the reverse is true because the industry history is littered with people who had great ideas and never really implemented them well. Big ideas just aren't worth as much as the many engineer-years of hard work it took Google to go from a concept to massive-scale HPC being a routine, commodity service. It's easy to say “Google succeeded because Larry and Sergey had two key Big Ideas” but that ignores the huge accomplishment they made in actually building a sustainable company which took those ideas to massive scale.