I want to create a parallel scanLeft(computes prefix sums for an associative operator) function for Hadoop (scalding in particular; see below for how this is done).
Given a sequence of numbers in a hdfs file (one per line) I want to calculate a new sequence with the sums of consecutive even/odd pairs. For example:
input sequence:
0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10
output sequence:
0+1, 2+3, 4+5, 6+7, 8+9, 10
i.e.
1,5,9,13,17,10
I think in order to do this, I need to write an InputFormat and InputSplits classes for Hadoop, but I don't know how to do this.
See this section 3.3 here. Below is an example algorithm in Scala:
// for simplicity assume input length is a power of 2
def scanadd(input : IndexedSeq[Int]) : IndexedSeq[Int] =
if (input.length == 1)
input
else {
//calculate a new collapsed sequence which is the sum of sequential even/odd pairs
val collapsed = IndexedSeq.tabulate(input.length/2)(i => input(2 * i) + input(2*i+1))
//recursively scan collapsed values
val scancollapse = scanadd(collapse)
//now we can use the scan of the collapsed seq to calculate the full sequence
val output = IndexedSeq.tabulate(input.length)(
i => i.evenOdd match {
//if an index is even then we can just look into the collapsed sequence and get the value
// otherwise we can look just before it and add the value at the current index
case Even => scancollapse(i/2)
case Odd => scancollapse((i-1)/2) + input(i)
}
output
}
I understand that this might need a fair bit of optimization for it to work nicely with Hadoop. Translating this directly I think would lead to pretty inefficient Hadoop code. For example, Obviously in Hadoop you can't use an IndexedSeq. I would appreciate any specific problems you see. I think it can probably be made to work well, though.
This was the best tutorial I found for writing an InputFormat and RecordReader. I ended up reading the whole split as one ArrayWritable record.