2,353 research outputs found
Towards co-designed optimizations in parallel frameworks: A MapReduce case study
The explosion of Big Data was followed by the proliferation of numerous
complex parallel software stacks whose aim is to tackle the challenges of data
deluge. A drawback of a such multi-layered hierarchical deployment is the
inability to maintain and delegate vital semantic information between layers in
the stack. Software abstractions increase the semantic distance between an
application and its generated code. However, parallel software frameworks
contain inherent semantic information that general purpose compilers are not
designed to exploit.
This paper presents a case study demonstrating how the specific semantic
information of the MapReduce paradigm can be exploited on multicore
architectures. MR4J has been implemented in Java and evaluated against
hand-optimized C and C++ equivalents. The initial observed results led to the
design of a semantically aware optimizer that runs automatically without
requiring modification to application code.
The optimizer is able to speedup the execution time of MR4J by up to 2.0x.
The introduced optimization not only improves the performance of the generated
code, during the map phase, but also reduces the pressure on the garbage
collector. This demonstrates how semantic information can be harnessed without
sacrificing sound software engineering practices when using parallel software
frameworks.Comment: 8 page
A Tale of Two Data-Intensive Paradigms: Applications, Abstractions, and Architectures
Scientific problems that depend on processing large amounts of data require
overcoming challenges in multiple areas: managing large-scale data
distribution, co-placement and scheduling of data with compute resources, and
storing and transferring large volumes of data. We analyze the ecosystems of
the two prominent paradigms for data-intensive applications, hereafter referred
to as the high-performance computing and the Apache-Hadoop paradigm. We propose
a basis, common terminology and functional factors upon which to analyze the
two approaches of both paradigms. We discuss the concept of "Big Data Ogres"
and their facets as means of understanding and characterizing the most common
application workloads found across the two paradigms. We then discuss the
salient features of the two paradigms, and compare and contrast the two
approaches. Specifically, we examine common implementation/approaches of these
paradigms, shed light upon the reasons for their current "architecture" and
discuss some typical workloads that utilize them. In spite of the significant
software distinctions, we believe there is architectural similarity. We discuss
the potential integration of different implementations, across the different
levels and components. Our comparison progresses from a fully qualitative
examination of the two paradigms, to a semi-quantitative methodology. We use a
simple and broadly used Ogre (K-means clustering), characterize its performance
on a range of representative platforms, covering several implementations from
both paradigms. Our experiments provide an insight into the relative strengths
of the two paradigms. We propose that the set of Ogres will serve as a
benchmark to evaluate the two paradigms along different dimensions.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figure
Optimizing the MapReduce Framework on Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessor
With the ease-of-programming, flexibility and yet efficiency, MapReduce has
become one of the most popular frameworks for building big-data applications.
MapReduce was originally designed for distributed-computing, and has been
extended to various architectures, e,g, multi-core CPUs, GPUs and FPGAs. In
this work, we focus on optimizing the MapReduce framework on Xeon Phi, which is
the latest product released by Intel based on the Many Integrated Core
Architecture. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to optimize
the MapReduce framework on the Xeon Phi.
In our work, we utilize advanced features of the Xeon Phi to achieve high
performance. In order to take advantage of the SIMD vector processing units, we
propose a vectorization friendly technique for the map phase to assist the
auto-vectorization as well as develop SIMD hash computation algorithms.
Furthermore, we utilize MIMD hyper-threading to pipeline the map and reduce to
improve the resource utilization. We also eliminate multiple local arrays but
use low cost atomic operations on the global array for some applications, which
can improve the thread scalability and data locality due to the coherent L2
caches. Finally, for a given application, our framework can either
automatically detect suitable techniques to apply or provide guideline for
users at compilation time. We conduct comprehensive experiments to benchmark
the Xeon Phi and compare our optimized MapReduce framework with a
state-of-the-art multi-core based MapReduce framework (Phoenix++). By
evaluating six real-world applications, the experimental results show that our
optimized framework is 1.2X to 38X faster than Phoenix++ for various
applications on the Xeon Phi
Garbage collection auto-tuning for Java MapReduce on Multi-Cores
MapReduce has been widely accepted as a simple programming pattern that can form the basis for efficient, large-scale, distributed data processing. The success of the MapReduce pattern has led to a variety of implementations for different computational scenarios. In this paper we present MRJ, a MapReduce Java framework for multi-core architectures. We evaluate its scalability on a four-core, hyperthreaded Intel Core i7 processor, using a set of standard MapReduce benchmarks. We investigate the significant impact that Java runtime garbage collection has on the performance and scalability of MRJ. We propose the use of memory management auto-tuning techniques based on machine learning. With our auto-tuning approach, we are able to achieve MRJ performance within 10% of optimal on 75% of our benchmark tests
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