Learning Scheduling Algorithms for Data Processing Clusters

Efficiently scheduling data processing jobs on distributed compute clusters requires complex algorithms. Current systems, however, use simple generalized heuristics and ignore workload characteristics, since developing and tuning a scheduling policy for each workload is infeasible. In this paper, we show that modern machine learning techniques can generate highly-efficient policies automatically. Decima uses reinforcement learning (RL) and neural networks to learn workload-specific scheduling algorithms without any human instruction beyond a high-level objective such as minimizing average job completion time. Off-the-shelf RL techniques, however, cannot handle the complexity and scale of the scheduling problem. To build Decima, we had to develop new representations for jobs' dependency graphs, design scalable RL models, and invent RL training methods for dealing with continuous stochastic job arrivals. Our prototype integration with Spark on a 25-node cluster shows that Decima improves the average job completion time over hand-tuned scheduling heuristics by at least 21%, achieving up to 2x improvement during periods of high cluster load

CogBoost: Boosting for Fast Cost-Sensitive Graph Classification

© 2015 IEEE. Graph classification has drawn great interests in recent years due to the increasing number of applications involving objects with complex structure relationships. To date, all existing graph classification algorithms assume, explicitly or implicitly, that misclassifying instances in different classes incurs an equal amount of cost (or risk), which is often not the case in real-life applications (where misclassifying a certain class of samples, such as diseased patients, is subject to more expensive costs than others). Although cost-sensitive learning has been extensively studied, all methods are based on data with instance-feature representation. Graphs, however, do not have features available for learning and the feature space of graph data is likely infinite and needs to be carefully explored in order to favor classes with a higher cost. In this paper, we propose, CogBoost, a fast cost-sensitive graph classification algorithm, which aims to minimize the misclassification costs (instead of the errors) and achieve fast learning speed for large scale graph data sets. To minimize the misclassification costs, CogBoost iteratively selects the most discriminative subgraph by considering costs of different classes, and then solves a linear programming problem in each iteration by using Bayes decision rule based optimal loss function. In addition, a cutting plane algorithm is derived to speed up the solving of linear programs for fast learning on large scale data sets. Experiments and comparisons on real-world large graph data sets demonstrate the effectiveness and the efficiency of our algorithm