Partitioning functions for steteful data parallelism in stream processing

Cataloged from PDF version of article.In this paper we study partitioning functions for stream processing systems that employ stateful data parallelism to improve application throughput. In particular, we develop partitioning functions that are effective under workloads where the domain of the partitioning key is large and its value distribution is skewed. We define various desirable properties for partitioning functions, ranging from balance properties such as memory, processing, and communication balance, structural properties such as compactness and fast lookup, and adaptation properties such as fast computation and minimal migration. We introduce a partitioning function structure that is compact and develop several associated heuristic construction techniques that exhibit good balance and low migration cost under skewed workloads. We provide experimental results that compare our partitioning functions to more traditional approaches such as uniform and consistent hashing, under different workload and application characteristics, and show superior performance

Cache-Efficient Aggregation: Hashing Is Sorting

For decades researchers have studied the duality of hashing and sorting for the implementation of the relational operators, especially for efficient aggregation. Depending on the underlying hardware and software architecture, the specifically implemented algorithms, and the data sets used in the experiments, different authors came to different conclusions about which is the better approach. In this paper we argue that in terms of cache efficiency, the two paradigms are actually the same. We support our claim by showing that the complexity of hashing is the same as the complexity of sorting in the external memory model. Furthermore we make the similarity of the two approaches obvious by designing an algorithmic framework that allows to switch seamlessly between hashing and sorting during execution. The fact that we mix hashing and sorting routines in the same algorithmic framework allows us to leverage the advantages of both approaches and makes their similarity obvious. On a more practical note, we also show how to achieve very low constant factors by tuning both the hashing and the sorting routines to modern hardware. Since we observe a complementary dependency of the constant factors of the two routines to the locality of the input, we exploit our framework to switch to the faster routine where appropriate. The result is a novel relational aggregation algorithm that is cache-efficient---independently and without prior knowledge of input skew and output cardinality---, highly parallelizable on modern multi-core systems, and operating at a speed close to the memory bandwidth, thus outperforming the state-of-the-art by up to 3.7x

10381 Summary and Abstracts Collection -- Robust Query Processing

Dagstuhl seminar 10381 on robust query processing (held 19.09.10 - 24.09.10) brought together a diverse set of researchers and practitioners with a broad range of expertise for the purpose of fostering discussion and collaboration regarding causes, opportunities, and solutions for achieving robust query processing. The seminar strove to build a unified view across the loosely-coupled system components responsible for the various stages of database query processing. Participants were chosen for their experience with database query processing and, where possible, their prior work in academic research or in product development towards robustness in database query processing. In order to pave the way to motivate, measure, and protect future advances in robust query processing, seminar 10381 focused on developing tests for measuring the robustness of query processing. In these proceedings, we first review the seminar topics, goals, and results, then present abstracts or notes of some of the seminar break-out sessions. We also include, as an appendix, the robust query processing reading list that was collected and distributed to participants before the seminar began, as well as summaries of a few of those papers that were contributed by some participants

Load Balancing Algorithms for Parallel Spatial Join on HPC Platforms

Geospatial datasets are growing in volume, complexity, and heterogeneity. For efficient execution of geospatial computations and analytics on large scale datasets, parallel processing is necessary. To exploit fine-grained parallel processing on large scale compute clusters, partitioning of skewed datasets in a load-balanced way is challenging. The workload in spatial join is data dependent and highly irregular. Moreover, wide variation in the size and density of geometries from one region of the map to another, further exacerbates the load imbalance. This dissertation focuses on spatial join operation used in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and spatial databases, where the inputs are two layers of geospatial data, and the output is a combination of the two layers according to join predicate.This dissertation introduces a novel spatial data partitioning algorithm geared towards load balancing the parallel spatial join processing. Unlike existing partitioning techniques, the proposed partitioning algorithm divides the spatial join workload instead of partitioning the individual datasets separately to provide better load-balancing. This workload partitioning algorithm has been evaluated on a high-performance computing system using real-world datasets. An intermediate output-sensitive duplication avoidance technique is proposed that decreases the external memory space requirement for storing spatial join candidates across the partitions. GPU acceleration is used to further reduce the spatial partitioning runtime. For dynamic load balancing in spatial join, a novel framework for fine-grained work stealing is presented. This framework is efficient and NUMA-aware. Performance improvements are demonstrated on shared and distributed memory architectures using threads and message passing. Experimental results show effective mitigation of data skew. The framework supports a variety of spatial join predicates and spatial overlay using partitioned and un-partitioned datasets

Engineering Aggregation Operators for Relational In-Memory Database Systems

In this thesis we study the design and implementation of Aggregation operators in the context of relational in-memory database systems. In particular, we identify and address the following challenges: cache-efficiency, CPU-friendliness, parallelism within and across processors, robust handling of skewed data, adaptive processing, processing with constrained memory, and integration with modern database architectures. Our resulting algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art by up to 3.7x

Processing Exact Results for Queries over Data Streams

In a growing number of information-processing applications, such as network-traffic monitoring, sensor networks, financial analysis, data mining for e-commerce, etc., data takes the form of continuous data streams rather than traditional stored databases/relational tuples. These applications have some common features like the need for real time analysis, huge volumes of data, and unpredictable and bursty arrivals of stream elements. In all of these applications, it is infeasible to process queries over data streams by loading the data into a traditional database management system (DBMS) or into main memory. Such an approach does not scale with high stream rates. As a consequence, systems that can manage streaming data have gained tremendous importance. The need to process a large number of continuous queries over bursty, high volume online data streams, potentially in real time, makes it imperative to design algorithms that should use limited resources. This dissertation focuses on processing exact results for join queries over high speed data streams using limited resources, and proposes several novel techniques for processing join queries incorporating secondary storages and non-dedicated computers. Existing approaches for stream joins either, (a) deal with memory limitations by shedding loads, and therefore can not produce exact or highly accurate results for the stream joins over data streams with time varying arrivals of stream tuples, or (b) suffer from large I/O-overheads due to random disk accesses. The proposed techniques exploit the high bandwidth of a disk subsystem by rendering the data access pattern largely sequential, eliminating small, random disk accesses. This dissertation proposes an I/O-efficient algorithm to process hybrid join queries, that join a fast, time varying or bursty data stream and a persistent disk relation. Such a hybrid join is the crux of a number of common transformations in an active data warehouse. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme reduces the response time in output results by exploiting spatio-temporal locality within the input stream, and minimizes disk overhead through disk-I/O amortization. The dissertation also proposes an algorithm to parallelize a stream join operator over a shared-nothing system. The proposed algorithm distributes the processing loads across a number of independent, non-dedicated nodes, based on a fixed or predefined communication pattern; dynamically maintains the degree of declustering in order to minimize communication and processing overheads; and presents mechanisms for reducing storage and communication overheads while scaling over a large number of nodes. We present experimental results showing the efficacy of the proposed algorithms

Enabling parallelism and optimizations in data mining algorithms for power-law data

Today's data mining tasks aim to extract meaningful information from a large amount of data in a reasonable time mainly via means of --- a) algorithmic advances, such as fast approximate algorithms and efficient learning algorithms, and b) architectural advances, such as machines with massive compute capacity involving distributed multi-core processors and high throughput accelerators. For current and future generation processors, parallel algorithms are critical for fully utilizing computing resources. Furthermore, exploiting data properties for performance gain becomes crucial for data mining applications. In this work, we focus our attention on power-law behavior –-- a common property found in a large class of data, such as text data, internet traffic, and click-stream data. Specifically, we address the following questions in the context of power-law data: How well do the critical data mining algorithms of current interest fit with today's parallel architectures? Which algorithmic and mapping opportunities can be leveraged to further improve performance?, and What are the relative challenges and gains for such approaches? Specifically, we first investigate the suitability of the "frequency estimation" problem for GPU-scale parallelism. Sketching algorithms are a popular choice for this task due to their desirable trade-off between estimation accuracy and space-time efficiency. However, most of the past work on sketch-based frequency estimation focused on CPU implementations. In our work, we propose a novel approach for sketches, which exploits the natural skewness in the power-law data to efficiently utilize the massive amounts of parallelism in modern GPUs. Next, we explore the problem of "identifying top-K frequent elements" for distributed data streams on modern distributed settings with both multi-core and multi-node CPU parallelism. Sketch-based approaches, such as Count-Min Sketch (CMS) with top-K heap, have an excellent update time but lacks the important property of reducibility, which is needed for exploiting data parallelism. On the other end, the popular Frequent Algorithm (FA) leads to reducible summaries, but its update costs are high. Our approach Topkapi, gives the best of both worlds, i.e., it is reducible like FA and has an efficient update time similar to CMS. For power-law data, Topkapi possesses strong theoretical guarantees and leads to significant performance gains, relative to past work. Finally, we study Word2Vec, a popular word embedding method widely used in Machine learning and Natural Language Processing applications, such as machine translation, sentiment analysis, and query answering. This time, we target Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) parallelism. With the increasing vector lengths in commodity CPUs, such as AVX-512 with a vector length of 512 bits, efficient vector processing unit utilization becomes a major performance game-changer. By employing a static multi-version code generation strategy coupled with an algorithmic approximation based on the power-law frequency distribution of words, we achieve significant reductions in training time relative to the state-of-the-art.Ph.D