Adapting MapReduce for realtime apps
From the post:
As much as MapReduce is popular, so much is the discussion to make it even better from a generalized approach to higher performance oriented approach. We will be discussing a few frameworks which have tried to adapt MapReduce further for higher performance orientation.
The first post in this series tries will discuss AMREF, an Adaptive MapReduce Framework designed for real time data intensive applications. (published in the paper Fan Zhang, Junwei Cao, Xiaolong Song, Hong Cai, Cheng Wu: AMREF: An Adaptive MapReduce Framework for Real Time Applications. GCC 2010: 157-162.)
If you are interested in squeezing more performance out of MapReduce, this looks like a good starting place.