Preliminary Evaluation of MapReduce for High-Performance Climate Data Analysis

MapReduce is an approach to high-performance analytics that may be useful to data intensive problems in climate research. It offers an analysis paradigm that uses clusters of computers and combines distributed storage of large data sets with parallel computation. We are particularly interested in the potential of MapReduce to speed up basic operations common to a wide range of analyses. In order to evaluate this potential, we are prototyping a series of canonical MapReduce operations over a test suite of observational and climate simulation datasets. Our initial focus has been on averaging operations over arbitrary spatial and temporal extents within Modern Era Retrospective- Analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA) data. Preliminary results suggest this approach can improve efficiencies within data intensive analytic workflows.