Tails in the cloud: a survey and taxonomy of straggler management within large-scale cloud data centres

Cloud computing systems are splitting compute- and data-intensive jobs into smaller tasks to execute them in a parallel manner using clusters to improve execution time. However, such systems at increasing scale are exposed to stragglers, whereby abnormally slow running tasks executing within a job substantially affect job performance completion. Such stragglers are a direct threat towards attaining fast execution of data-intensive jobs within cloud computing. Researchers have proposed an assortment of different mechanisms, frameworks, and management techniques to detect and mitigate stragglers both proactively and reactively. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of straggler management techniques within large-scale cloud data centres. We provide a detailed taxonomy of straggler causes, as well as proposed management and mitigation techniques based on straggler characteristics and properties. From this systematic review, we outline several outstanding challenges and potential directions of possible future work for straggler research

An Improved Straggler Identification Scheme For Data-Intensive Computing On Cloud Platforms

One of the challenges faced by data-intensive computing is the problem of stragglers, which can significantly increase the job completion time. Various proactive and reactive straggler mitigation techniques have been developed to address the problem. The straggler identification scheme is a crucial part of the straggler mitigation techniques, as only when stragglers are detected not only correctly but also early enough, the improvement in job completion time can make a real difference. Although the classical standard deviation method is a widely adopted straggler identification scheme, it is not an ideal solution due to certain inherent limitations. In this paper, we present Tukey\u27s method, another statistical method for outlier detection, which is more suitable for the identification of stragglers for two reasons. First, it is robust to extreme observations from stragglers. Second, it can identify stragglers and, more importantly, start speculative execution earlier than the standard deviation method. Our extensive simulation results confirm that Tukey\u27s method can remarkably outperform the standard deviation method