The return of the xapping

The clever folks at Google Labs seems to have reinvented the xapping of Connection Machine Lisp fame. Of all the ideas, great and small, that came out of the CM project, xappings stood out to me as the most practical.

Both of these papers are worth reading in their entirety. I think it says something about the fundamental importance of map/reduce as a tool for parallelism that it shows up in essentially the same form in two radically different architectures.