Communication Steps for Parallel Query Processing

We consider the problem of computing a relational query $q$ on a large input database of size $n$, using a large number $p$ of servers. The computation is performed in rounds, and each server can receive only $O(n/p^{1-\varepsilon})$ bits of data, where $\varepsilon \in [0,1]$ is a parameter that controls replication. We examine how many global communication steps are needed to compute $q$. We establish both lower and upper bounds, in two settings. For a single round of communication, we give lower bounds in the strongest possible model, where arbitrary bits may be exchanged; we show that any algorithm requires $\varepsilon \geq 1-1/\tau^*$, where $\tau^*$ is the fractional vertex cover of the hypergraph of $q$. We also give an algorithm that matches the lower bound for a specific class of databases. For multiple rounds of communication, we present lower bounds in a model where routing decisions for a tuple are tuple-based. We show that for the class of tree-like queries there exists a tradeoff between the number of rounds and the space exponent $\varepsilon$. The lower bounds for multiple rounds are the first of their kind. Our results also imply that transitive closure cannot be computed in O(1) rounds of communication

Efficient Subgraph Matching on Billion Node Graphs

The ability to handle large scale graph data is crucial to an increasing number of applications. Much work has been dedicated to supporting basic graph operations such as subgraph matching, reachability, regular expression matching, etc. In many cases, graph indices are employed to speed up query processing. Typically, most indices require either super-linear indexing time or super-linear indexing space. Unfortunately, for very large graphs, super-linear approaches are almost always infeasible. In this paper, we study the problem of subgraph matching on billion-node graphs. We present a novel algorithm that supports efficient subgraph matching for graphs deployed on a distributed memory store. Instead of relying on super-linear indices, we use efficient graph exploration and massive parallel computing for query processing. Our experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of performing subgraph matching on web-scale graph data.Comment: VLDB201

On the Evaluation of RDF Distribution Algorithms Implemented over Apache Spark

Querying very large RDF data sets in an efficient manner requires a sophisticated distribution strategy. Several innovative solutions have recently been proposed for optimizing data distribution with predefined query workloads. This paper presents an in-depth analysis and experimental comparison of five representative and complementary distribution approaches. For achieving fair experimental results, we are using Apache Spark as a common parallel computing framework by rewriting the concerned algorithms using the Spark API. Spark provides guarantees in terms of fault tolerance, high availability and scalability which are essential in such systems. Our different implementations aim to highlight the fundamental implementation-independent characteristics of each approach in terms of data preparation, load balancing, data replication and to some extent to query answering cost and performance. The presented measures are obtained by testing each system on one synthetic and one real-world data set over query workloads with differing characteristics and different partitioning constraints.Comment: 16 pages, 3 figure

Conclave: secure multi-party computation on big data (extended TR)

Secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC) allows mutually distrusting parties to run joint computations without revealing private data. Current MPC algorithms scale poorly with data size, which makes MPC on "big data" prohibitively slow and inhibits its practical use. Many relational analytics queries can maintain MPC's end-to-end security guarantee without using cryptographic MPC techniques for all operations. Conclave is a query compiler that accelerates such queries by transforming them into a combination of data-parallel, local cleartext processing and small MPC steps. When parties trust others with specific subsets of the data, Conclave applies new hybrid MPC-cleartext protocols to run additional steps outside of MPC and improve scalability further. Our Conclave prototype generates code for cleartext processing in Python and Spark, and for secure MPC using the Sharemind and Obliv-C frameworks. Conclave scales to data sets between three and six orders of magnitude larger than state-of-the-art MPC frameworks support on their own. Thanks to its hybrid protocols, Conclave also substantially outperforms SMCQL, the most similar existing system.Comment: Extended technical report for EuroSys 2019 pape

The Family of MapReduce and Large Scale Data Processing Systems

In the last two decades, the continuous increase of computational power has produced an overwhelming flow of data which has called for a paradigm shift in the computing architecture and large scale data processing mechanisms. MapReduce is a simple and powerful programming model that enables easy development of scalable parallel applications to process vast amounts of data on large clusters of commodity machines. It isolates the application from the details of running a distributed program such as issues on data distribution, scheduling and fault tolerance. However, the original implementation of the MapReduce framework had some limitations that have been tackled by many research efforts in several followup works after its introduction. This article provides a comprehensive survey for a family of approaches and mechanisms of large scale data processing mechanisms that have been implemented based on the original idea of the MapReduce framework and are currently gaining a lot of momentum in both research and industrial communities. We also cover a set of introduced systems that have been implemented to provide declarative programming interfaces on top of the MapReduce framework. In addition, we review several large scale data processing systems that resemble some of the ideas of the MapReduce framework for different purposes and application scenarios. Finally, we discuss some of the future research directions for implementing the next generation of MapReduce-like solutions.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1105.4252 by other author

Speculative Approximations for Terascale Analytics

Model calibration is a major challenge faced by the plethora of statistical analytics packages that are increasingly used in Big Data applications. Identifying the optimal model parameters is a time-consuming process that has to be executed from scratch for every dataset/model combination even by experienced data scientists. We argue that the incapacity to evaluate multiple parameter configurations simultaneously and the lack of support to quickly identify sub-optimal configurations are the principal causes. In this paper, we develop two database-inspired techniques for efficient model calibration. Speculative parameter testing applies advanced parallel multi-query processing methods to evaluate several configurations concurrently. The number of configurations is determined adaptively at runtime, while the configurations themselves are extracted from a distribution that is continuously learned following a Bayesian process. Online aggregation is applied to identify sub-optimal configurations early in the processing by incrementally sampling the training dataset and estimating the objective function corresponding to each configuration. We design concurrent online aggregation estimators and define halting conditions to accurately and timely stop the execution. We apply the proposed techniques to distributed gradient descent optimization -- batch and incremental -- for support vector machines and logistic regression models. We implement the resulting solutions in GLADE PF-OLA -- a state-of-the-art Big Data analytics system -- and evaluate their performance over terascale-size synthetic and real datasets. The results confirm that as many as 32 configurations can be evaluated concurrently almost as fast as one, while sub-optimal configurations are detected accurately in as little as a $1/20^{\text{th}}$ fraction of the time