Clash of the Titans: MapReduce vs. Spark for Large Scale Data Analytics
Summary: Profiling-driven, architecture-level comparison of MapReduce and Spark across shuffle, execution model, and caching, with tools linking task plans to resource use. Spark is ~2.5x–5x faster on WordCount, k-means, and PageRank; gains from hash-based aggregation and RDD caching, while MapReduce wins Sort via shuffle efficiency. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)
Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time
Authors
- 1. Juwei Shi (IBM Research - China)
- 2. Yunjie Qiu (Renmin University of China)
- 3. Umar Farooq Minhas (IBM)
- 4. Limei Jiao (Renmin University of China)
- 5. Chen Wang (Tsinghua University)
- 6. Berthold Reinwald (IBM)
- 7. Fatma Özcan (IBM)
BibTeX Citation
@article{shi_vldb15,
title = {{Clash of the Titans: MapReduce vs. Spark for Large Scale Data Analytics}},
author = {Shi, Juwei and Qiu, Yunjie and Minhas, Umar Farooq and Jiao, Limei and Wang, Chen and Reinwald, Berthold and Özcan, Fatma},
journal = {PVLDB},
series = {{VLDB} '15},
volume = {8},
number = {13},
doi = {10.14778/2831360.2831365},
url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/2831360.2831365},
year = {2015}
}Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)
Showing 7 of 7 citing papers.
| Rank | Citing Paper | Year | Venue | Pagerank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4,224 | Comparative Evaluation of Big-Data Systems on Scientific Image Analytics Workloads | 2017 | VLDB | 6.8214304e-05 |
| 5,476 | Lifetime-Based Memory Management for Distributed Data Processing Systems | 2016 | VLDB | 6.2052672e-05 |
| 7,311 | Lachesis: Automatic Partitioning for UDF-Centric Analytics | 2021 | VLDB | 5.6491618e-05 |
| 9,572 | PlinyCompute: A Platform for High-Performance, Distributed, Data-Intensive Tool Development | 2018 | SIGMOD | 5.2528121e-05 |
| 11,625 | Accelerating Complex Analytics using Speculation | 2021 | CIDR | 5.093636e-05 |
| 11,889 | An Experimental Evaluation of Garbage Collectors on Big Data Applications | 2019 | VLDB | 5.093636e-05 |
| 12,006 | Query-able Kafka: An agile data analytics pipeline for mobile wireless networks | 2017 | VLDB | 5.093636e-05 |
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Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)
Showing 3 of 3 cited papers.
Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.
| Rank | Cited Paper | Year | Venue | Pagerank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3 | Pregel: A System for Large-Scale Graph Processing | 2010 | SIGMOD | 0.0012250108 |
| 735 | Profiling, What-if Analysis, and Cost-based Optimization of MapReduce Programs | 2011 | VLDB | 0.00014522606 |
| 7,546 | MRTuner: A Toolkit to Enable Holistic Optimization for MapReduce Jobs | 2014 | VLDB | 5.6024593e-05 |
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