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Sub-system

Distributed data processing: the petabyte job before the training job

Before a training run there is a much less glamorous computation: reading petabytes of raw text, filtering most of it away, deduplicating what remains and writing it out in a form a cluster can stream. That runs on ordinary compute with general-purpose distributed frameworks, and it is a real cost line of its own.

In one sentence

Distributed data processing frameworks execute transformations over datasets too large for one machine, splitting work across a cluster and handling partitioning, shuffling and failure recovery.

The characteristic operation is the shuffle: redistributing records across the cluster so that everything sharing a key ends up in one place. Deduplication needs it, grouping needs it, and it is where these jobs spend most of their time and all of their network bandwidth. Framework design is largely about making shuffles cheaper or avoiding them.

The corpus work is a sequence of such passes — parse, normalise, language-identify, score for quality, deduplicate near-matches, mix according to weights, tokenise, shard. Each is a full pass over petabytes, and at that scale the difference between a well-planned pipeline and a naive one is measured in weeks of cluster time.

How it works

Near-duplicate detection at scale

Exact duplicates are easy. Documents that differ by a boilerplate header are not, and they are far more common. The standard approach hashes overlapping shingles of each document so that similar documents collide, then compares only within collisions — which turns an impossible all-pairs comparison into a large but tractable shuffle.

Batch and streaming have converged

Corpus preparation is batch, but the same engines now express streaming pipelines with the same operators, which matters for continuously updated retrieval indexes and for feature pipelines. Teams increasingly run one framework for both rather than maintaining separate systems.

This is not accelerator work

Almost none of it uses accelerators. It is processor-bound and network-bound on ordinary cloud machines, which is why data preparation cost is invisible in accelerator-hour accounting and shows up separately — and why it is frequently underestimated when a training budget is drawn up.

What this depends on

Technology dependencies are solved by engineering; supply dependencies are solved by building something, which takes years.

  • Supply chain

    General-purpose compute and object storage

    Corpus jobs run on ordinary cloud instances against object storage, not on the training cluster.

    Data centres
  • Technology

    Cluster resource management

    These jobs are scheduled on the same shared infrastructure as everything else and compete for it.

    Container platforms
  • Standard

    Columnar and table file formats

    Engines interoperate because they read and write the same on-disk formats. Without them a corpus prepared in one framework would have to be rewritten to be read by another.

What depends on this

Other pages in this map that name Data processing frameworks as something they cannot do without.

Who supplies this

What each company supplies at this step, and — where a public figure exists — its share of this specific market — with what that share measures, the period it covers and who published it. Some rows also show the company’s own reported revenue for the segment covering this step, which is a different thing: it says how much this business matters to that company, not how much of the market it holds. Not a ranking and not a recommendation.

  • SnowflakeSNOW

    Provides managed large-scale data processing and storage platforms.

  • AlphabetGOOGL

    Operates managed batch and streaming data processing services.

  • Amazon.comAMZN

    Operates managed distributed processing and object storage services.

  • DatabricksPrivate

    Commercialises the dominant open-source distributed processing engine.

  • MicrosoftMSFT

    Runs a managed analytics and processing stack, and is the largest hosted home for the open engines.

  • AnyscalePrivate

    Commercialises the distributed compute framework most of these pipelines use to fan work across a cluster.

  • ClouderaPrivate

    Maintains the on-premises distribution of the batch stack for operators who cannot move the data.

  • NVIDIANVDA

    Supplies the dataframe and loader libraries that move parts of this work off the CPU and onto the accelerator.

  • OracleORCL

    Runs the warehouse a large share of enterprise corpora are already sitting in before any of this starts.

  • Alibaba GroupBABA

    Operates the batch and stream platform most Chinese pipelines run on, and maintains the stream engine underneath it.

  • Hugging FacePrivate

    Supplies the dataset and deduplication tooling most open corpora are built with.

  • International Business MachinesIBM

    Supplies the on-premises data platform, and the format work behind open table storage.

Questions people ask about this

Why is data preparation expensive if it uses no accelerators?
Because it is many full passes over petabytes, and each pass shuffles data across a network. Ordinary compute is cheap per hour and the job is enormous, so the total is material — and it is easy to omit from a budget that counts only accelerator time.
Why is deduplication so hard?
Because the duplicates that matter are near-duplicates, and comparing every document with every other is impossible at this scale. The workable approach hashes documents so similar ones land together and compares only within those groups, which is effective and is still one of the largest shuffles in the pipeline.

How these pages are written

Each page explains one technology in plain language, states what it depends on, and names companies by what they supply at that step. Company roles are described qualitatively and deliberately carry no market shares, revenue figures or rankings — those change faster than an explainer can, and a stale number is worse than none. Ticker links point at company pages on this site and are provided for reference only.

Nothing here is investment advice, a recommendation, or a forecast. A company named on a page about a technology is not thereby a good investment, and the chokepoints described are structural facts about supply chains rather than predictions about prices. Technology moves; where a page describes something as unresolved or in development, that was true when it was written.

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