This document discusses using Hadoop and MapReduce to perform large-scale data parsing and algorithm development. It provides examples of finding members of protein clusters in a dataset containing 12 million rows and 30GB of data. Traditional approaches like hashing and sorting the data are discussed and compared to the MapReduce approach. The MapReduce approach automatically handles data distribution across nodes, parallel processing of data fragments using Map and Reduce functions, and task scheduling to handle failures. Key aspects of MapReduce like the Map, Shuffle, and Reduce phases are outlined.