MapReduce is a programming model and associated implementation for processing large datasets in parallel across clusters of computers. It allows for automatic parallelization, distribution, fault tolerance, and monitoring of large-scale computations. The MapReduce model consists of a map function that processes input key-value pairs to generate intermediate key-value pairs, and a reduce function that merges all intermediate values associated with the same intermediate key. A MapReduce job is made up of many map and reduce tasks that are executed in parallel by the framework on a distributed computing infrastructure.