Google Research Publication: MapReduce

Google Research Publication: MapReduce: "MapReduce is a programming model and an associated implementation for processing and generating large data sets. Users specify a map function that processes a key/value pair to generate a set of intermediate key/value pairs, and a reduce function that merges all intermediate values associated with the same intermediate key. Many real world tasks are expressible in this model, as shown in the paper."

I think asw multicore CPUs continue to procreate we will see more and more of this type of solution being used.