Distributed aggregation for data-parallel computing

Data-intensive applications are increasingly designed to execute on large computing clusters. Grouped aggregation is a core primitive of many distributed programming models, and it is often the most efficient available mechanism for computations such as matrix multiplication and graph traversal. Such algorithms typically require non-standard aggregations that are more sophisticated than traditional built-in database functions such as Sum and Max. As a result, the ease of programming user-defined aggregations, and the efficiency of their implementation, is of great current interest.