Earning Points. Starwood's Preferred Guest program is fairly straightforward: the more nights you spend at participating hotels, the faster you'll earn a free night.
The mapper output (intermediate data) is stored on the Local file system (NOT HDFS) of each individual mapper nodes. This is typically a temporary directory location which can be setup in config by the hadoop administrator. The intermediate data is cleaned up after the Hadoop Job completes.
As seen in the EXECUTING phase, the map will write (using Mapper.Context.write()) its output into a circular in-memory buffer (MapTask.MapOutputBuffer). The size of this buffer is fixed and determined by the configuration parameter mapreduce.task.io.sort.mb (default: 100MB).