Map-Reduce for Machine Learning on Multicore (pdf)

The premise of map-reduce seems to basically be, "if you're asking questions of a set of objects then you can divide that set by the number of cores you have and ask questions in parallel".

Doesn't that seem intuitively obvious? There sure are a whole lot of papers being spawned over this obvious thing. I'll go finish the paper now and see if it's simply about converting machine learning algorithms into "ask questions of a set of objects" form.