CPSC 416 Lab 1: MapReduce

Introduction

In this lab you'll build a MapReduce system. You'll implement a worker process that calls application Map and Reduce functions and handles reading and writing files, and a coordinator process that hands out tasks to workers and copes with failed workers. You'll be building something similar to the MapReduce paper. (Note: this lab uses "coordinator" instead of the paper's "master".)

Getting Started

Setting up Go

You need to setup Go to do the labs. Here's how to install and configure Go:

Installing Go

On macOS:

# Using Homebrew (recommended)
brew install go

# Or download from https://golang.org/dl/
# Download the .pkg installer and follow the installation wizard

On Linux:

# Download and install from https://golang.org/dl/
wget https://golang.org/dl/go1.24.5.linux-amd64.tar.gz
sudo tar -C /usr/local -xzf go1.24.5.linux-amd64.tar.gz

On Windows:

• Download the installer from https://golang.org/dl/
• Run the .msi installer and follow the installation wizard

Configuring Go

After installation, you need to set up your environment:

1. Add Go to your PATH (if not already done by the installer):

   # Add to your ~/.bashrc, ~/.zshrc, or ~/.profile
   export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin
   
   # On macOS with Homebrew, Go is usually already in PATH
   # If not, add: export PATH=$PATH:/opt/homebrew/bin

2. Set up your Go workspace (optional but recommended):

   export GOPATH=$HOME/go
   export PATH=$PATH:$GOPATH/bin

3. Verify your installation:

   go version
   # Should output something like: go version go1.24.5 darwin/arm64

Project Setup

Once Go is installed, navigate to your lab directory and initialize the Go module:

cd /path/to/your/cpsc416-2025w1
go mod init cpsc416-2025w1

This creates a go.mod file that defines your project as a Go module, which is required for building plugins and managing dependencies.

Running the Sequential Example

We supply you with a simple sequential mapreduce implementation in main/mrsequential.go. It runs the maps and reduces one at a time, in a single process. We also provide you with a couple of MapReduce applications: word-count in mrapps/wc.go, and a text indexer in mrapps/indexer.go. You can run word count sequentially as follows:

$ cd Lab01/main
$ go build -buildmode=plugin ../mrapps/wc.go
$ rm mr-out*
$ go run mrsequential.go wc.so pg*.txt
$ more mr-out-0
A 509
ABOUT 2
ACT 8
...

mrsequential.go leaves its output in the file mr-out-0. The input is from the text files named pg-xxx.txt.

Feel free to borrow code from mrsequential.go. You should also have a look at mrapps/wc.go to see what MapReduce application code looks like.

Your Job

Your job is to implement a distributed MapReduce, consisting of two programs, the coordinator and the worker. There will be just one coordinator process, and one or more worker processes executing in parallel. In a real system the workers would run on a bunch of different machines, but for this lab you'll run them all on a single machine. The workers will talk to the coordinator via RPC. Each worker process will, in a loop, ask the coordinator for a task, read the task's input from one or more files, execute the task, write the task's output to one or more files, and again ask the coordinator for a new task. The coordinator should notice if a worker hasn't completed its task in a reasonable amount of time (for this lab, use ten seconds), and give the same task to a different worker.

We have given you a little code to start you off. The "main" routines for the coordinator and worker are in main/mrcoordinator.go and main/mrworker.go; don't change these files. You should put your implementation in mr/coordinator.go, mr/worker.go, and mr/rpc.go.

Here's how to run your code on the word-count MapReduce application. First, make sure the word-count plugin is freshly built:

$ go build -buildmode=plugin mrapps/wc.go

In the main directory, run the coordinator.

$ rm mr-out*
$ go run mrcoordinator.go pg-*.txt

The pg-*.txt arguments to mrcoordinator.go are the input files; each file corresponds to one "split", and is the input to one Map task.

In one or more other windows, run some workers:

$ go run mrworker.go wc.so

When the workers and coordinator have finished, look at the output in mr-out-*. When you've completed the lab, the sorted union of the output files should match the sequential output, like this:

$ cat mr-out-* | sort | more
A 509
ABOUT 2
ACT 8
...

We supply you with a test script in main/test-mr.sh. The tests check that the wc and indexer MapReduce applications produce the correct output when given the pg-xxx.txt files as input. The tests also check that your implementation runs the Map and Reduce tasks in parallel, and that your implementation recovers from workers that crash while running tasks.

If you run the test script now, it will hang because the coordinator never finishes:

$ cd Lab01/main
$ bash test-mr.sh
*** Starting wc test.

You can change ret := false to true in the Done function in mr/coordinator.go so that the coordinator exits immediately. Then:

$ bash test-mr.sh
*** Starting wc test.
sort: No such file or directory
cmp: EOF on mr-wc-all
--- wc output is not the same as mr-correct-wc.txt
--- wc test: FAIL
$

The test script expects to see output in files named mr-out-X, one for each reduce task. The empty implementations of mr/coordinator.go and mr/worker.go don't produce those files (or do much of anything else), so the test fails.

When you've finished, the test script output should look like this:

$ bash test-mr.sh
*** Starting wc test.
--- wc test: PASS
*** Starting indexer test.
--- indexer test: PASS
*** Starting map parallelism test.
--- map parallelism test: PASS
*** Starting reduce parallelism test.
--- reduce parallelism test: PASS
*** Starting job count test.
--- job count test: PASS
*** Starting early exit test.
--- early exit test: PASS
*** Starting crash test.
--- crash test: PASS
*** PASSED ALL TESTS
$

You may see some errors from the Go RPC package that look like

2019/12/16 13:27:09 rpc.Register: method "Done" has 1 input parameters; needs exactly three

Ignore these messages; registering the coordinator as an RPC server checks if all its methods are suitable for RPCs (have 3 inputs); we know that Done is not called via RPC.

Additionally, depending on your strategy for terminating worker processes, you may see some errors of the form

2025/02/11 16:21:32 dialing:dial unix /var/tmp/416-mr-501: connect: connection refused

It is fine to see a handful of these messages per test; they arise when the worker is unable to contact the coordinator RPC server after the coordinator has exited.

A Few Rules

• The map phase should divide the intermediate keys into buckets for nReduce reduce tasks, where nReduce is the number of reduce tasks -- the argument that main/mrcoordinator.go passes to MakeCoordinator(). Each mapper should create nReduce intermediate files for consumption by the reduce tasks.
• The worker implementation should put the output of the X'th reduce task in the file mr-out-X.
• A mr-out-X file should contain one line per Reduce function output. The line should be generated with the Go "%v %v" format, called with the key and value. Have a look in main/mrsequential.go for the line commented "this is the correct format". The test script will fail if your implementation deviates too much from this format.
• You can modify mr/worker.go, mr/coordinator.go, and mr/rpc.go. You can temporarily modify other files for testing, but make sure your code works with the original versions; we'll test with the original versions.
• The worker should put intermediate Map output in files in the current directory, where your worker can later read them as input to Reduce tasks.
• main/mrcoordinator.go expects mr/coordinator.go to implement a Done() method that returns true when the MapReduce job is completely finished; at that point, mrcoordinator.go will exit.
• When the job is completely finished, the worker processes should exit. A simple way to implement this is to use the return value from call(): if the worker fails to contact the coordinator, it can assume that the coordinator has exited because the job is done, so the worker can terminate too. Depending on your design, you might also find it helpful to have a "please exit" pseudo-task that the coordinator can give to workers.

Hints

• One way to get started is to modify mr/worker.go's Worker() to send an RPC to the coordinator asking for a task. Then modify the coordinator to respond with the file name of an as-yet-unstarted map task. Then modify the worker to read that file and call the application Map function, as in mrsequential.go.
• The application Map and Reduce functions are loaded at run-time using the Go plugin package, from files whose names end in .so.
• If you change anything in the mr/ directory, you will probably have to re-build any MapReduce plugins you use, with something like go build -buildmode=plugin mrapps/wc.go
• This lab relies on the workers sharing a file system. That's straightforward when all workers run on the same machine, but would require a global filesystem like GFS if the workers ran on different machines.
• A reasonable naming convention for intermediate files is mr-X-Y, where X is the Map task number, and Y is the reduce task number.
• The worker's map task code will need a way to store intermediate key/value pairs in files in a way that can be correctly read back during reduce tasks. One possibility is to use Go's encoding/json package. To write key/value pairs in JSON format to an open file:

  enc := json.NewEncoder(file)
  for _, kv := ... {
      err := enc.Encode(&kv)
  }

  and to read such a file back:

  dec := json.NewDecoder(file)
  for {
      var kv KeyValue
      if err := dec.Decode(&kv); err != nil {
          break
      }
      kva = append(kva, kv)
  }

• The map part of your worker can use the ihash(key) function (in worker.go) to pick the reduce task for a given key.
• You can steal some code from mrsequential.go for reading Map input files, for sorting intermediate key/value pairs between the Map and Reduce, and for storing Reduce output in files.
• The coordinator, as an RPC server, will be concurrent; don't forget to lock shared data.
• Use Go's race detector, with go run -race. test-mr.sh has a comment at the start that tells you how to run it with -race. When we grade your labs, we will not use the race detector. Nevertheless, if your code has races, there's a good chance it will fail when we test it even without the race detector.
• Workers will sometimes need to wait, e.g. reduces can't start until the last map has finished. One possibility is for workers to periodically ask the coordinator for work, sleeping with time.Sleep() between each request. Another possibility is for the relevant RPC handler in the coordinator to have a loop that waits, either with time.Sleep() or sync.Cond. Go runs the handler for each RPC in its own thread, so the fact that one handler is waiting needn't prevent the coordinator from processing other RPCs.
• The coordinator can't reliably distinguish between crashed workers, workers that are alive but have stalled for some reason, and workers that are executing but too slowly to be useful. The best you can do is have the coordinator wait for some amount of time, and then give up and re-issue the task to a different worker. For this lab, have the coordinator wait for ten seconds; after that the coordinator should assume the worker has died (of course, it might not have).
• If you choose to implement Backup Tasks (Section 3.6), note that we test that your code doesn't schedule extraneous tasks when workers execute tasks without crashing. Backup tasks should only be scheduled after some relatively long period of time (e.g., 10s).
• To test crash recovery, you can use the mrapps/crash.go application plugin. It randomly exits in the Map and Reduce functions.
• To ensure that nobody observes partially written files in the presence of crashes, the MapReduce paper mentions the trick of using a temporary file and atomically renaming it once it is completely written. You can use ioutil.TempFile (or os.CreateTemp if you are running Go 1.17 or later) to create a temporary file and os.Rename to atomically rename it.
• test-mr.sh runs all its processes in the sub-directory mr-tmp, so if something goes wrong and you want to look at intermediate or output files, look there. Feel free to temporarily modify test-mr.sh to exit after the failing test, so the script does not continue testing (and overwrite the output files).
• test-mr-many.sh runs test-mr.sh many times in a row, which you may want to do in order to spot low-probability bugs. It takes as an argument the number of times to run the tests. You should not run several test-mr.sh instances in parallel because the coordinator will reuse the same socket, causing conflicts.
• Go RPC sends only struct fields whose names start with capital letters. Sub-structures must also have capitalized field names.
• When calling the RPC call() function, the reply struct should contain all default values. RPC calls should look like this:

  reply := SomeType{}
  call(..., &reply)

  without setting any fields of reply before the call. If you pass reply structures that have non-default fields, the RPC system may silently return incorrect values.

Submission Instructions

Add an INFO.md file inside the mr directory. If you used GenAI for this lab, cite it (i.e., name the tool) and annotate it (i.e., briefly explain how you used it) in this file. For example, "We asked ChatGPT for a simple explanation of Go's RPC mechanism." or "We asked Cursor to generate (from specifications in the prompt) all the arguments and reply structs in the rpc.go file."

In the INFO.md file, also list all the team members and how you split up the tasks. If you were pair (group) programming all the time, say so.

We expect you to only modify rpc.go, worker.go and coodinator.go files in the mr folder. To submit your solution, first compress the mr directory to create the mr.tar.gz file. For example, on Linux or macOS, if you are inside the mr directory, you can run the following commands.

cd ..
tar -czvf mr.tar.gz mr/

Finally, sign-up your group on Canvas (self sign-up is enabled) and submit the mr.tar.gz file.