MySpace bring open source MapReduce to .NET

Quizmt's C# IDE The social network MySpace has released Quizmt, the MapReduce based system it uses to power it's "People you may know" feature. Quizmt has been made available under the GPL3 and offers a simple way to install and make use of the MapReduce concept on Windows and .NET based systems. Using Quizmt's built in IDE/Debugger with C#, developers can create jobs to be executed by a cluster of systems and even debug applications running on the cluster. Quizmt only runs on Windows 2003 Server, Windows 2008 Server and Windows Vista currently, and requires .NET 3.5 SP1.

In a posting on the MySpace blog MySpace's Mike Jones says that "Quizmt is unique because it was developed using C#.NET specifically for Windows platforms". Although this is a first public release, Jones says the performance of Quizmt is very good; "Based on our internal benchmarks, we have shown its processing speeds to be competitive with the leading MapReduce open source projects on a lesser number of cores". Jones sees Quizmt as bringing the power of MapReduce based systems to Windows .NET developers and sees a future for Quizmt in powering BI (Business Intelligence) analysis as companies move towards mining their data. MySpace plans to use Quizmt to power future MySpace features. The Quizmt project is hosted on Google Code with an installer, FAQ, Quick start guide and Reference guide available to download. Source code is available from the subversion repository.

(djwm)