Hadoop speculative execution
You can found a good description about speculative execution at Wikipedia. Here are the two properties to configure the use of this feature:
mapred.map.tasks.speculative.execution
mapred.reduce.tasks.speculative.execution
Or if you are using Hadoop 2.x:
mapreduce.map.speculative
mapreduce.reduce.speculative
Most time it is useful but in some scenarios disabling it will make a big difference.