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.
The number of files inside the input directory is used for deciding the number of Map Tasks of a job. The Application Master will launch one MapTask for each map split. Typically, there is a map split for each input file.