BigDataBench: a Big Data Benchmark Suite from Internet Services

As architecture, systems, and data management communities pay greater attention to innovative big data systems and architectures, the pressure of benchmarking and evaluating these systems rises. Considering the broad use of big data systems, big data benchmarks must include diversity of data and workloads. Most of the state-of-the-art big data benchmarking efforts target evaluating specific types of applications or system software stacks, and hence they are not qualified for serving the purposes mentioned above. This paper presents our joint research efforts on this issue with several industrial partners. Our big data benchmark suite BigDataBench not only covers broad application scenarios, but also includes diverse and representative data sets. BigDataBench is publicly available from http://prof.ict.ac.cn/BigDataBench . Also, we comprehensively characterize 19 big data workloads included in BigDataBench with varying data inputs. On a typical state-of-practice processor, Intel Xeon E5645, we have the following observations: First, in comparison with the traditional benchmarks: including PARSEC, HPCC, and SPECCPU, big data applications have very low operation intensity; Second, the volume of data input has non-negligible impact on micro-architecture characteristics, which may impose challenges for simulation-based big data architecture research; Last but not least, corroborating the observations in CloudSuite and DCBench (which use smaller data inputs), we find that the numbers of L1 instruction cache misses per 1000 instructions of the big data applications are higher than in the traditional benchmarks; also, we find that L3 caches are effective for the big data applications, corroborating the observation in DCBench.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures, The 20th IEEE International Symposium On High Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA-2014), February 15-19, 2014, Orlando, Florida, US

Performance Characterization of In-Memory Data Analytics on a Modern Cloud Server

In last decade, data analytics have rapidly progressed from traditional disk-based processing to modern in-memory processing. However, little effort has been devoted at enhancing performance at micro-architecture level. This paper characterizes the performance of in-memory data analytics using Apache Spark framework. We use a single node NUMA machine and identify the bottlenecks hampering the scalability of workloads. We also quantify the inefficiencies at micro-architecture level for various data analysis workloads. Through empirical evaluation, we show that spark workloads do not scale linearly beyond twelve threads, due to work time inflation and thread level load imbalance. Further, at the micro-architecture level, we observe memory bound latency to be the major cause of work time inflation.Comment: Accepted to The 5th IEEE International Conference on Big Data and Cloud Computing (BDCloud 2015

Characterizing and Subsetting Big Data Workloads

Big data benchmark suites must include a diversity of data and workloads to be useful in fairly evaluating big data systems and architectures. However, using truly comprehensive benchmarks poses great challenges for the architecture community. First, we need to thoroughly understand the behaviors of a variety of workloads. Second, our usual simulation-based research methods become prohibitively expensive for big data. As big data is an emerging field, more and more software stacks are being proposed to facilitate the development of big data applications, which aggravates hese challenges. In this paper, we first use Principle Component Analysis (PCA) to identify the most important characteristics from 45 metrics to characterize big data workloads from BigDataBench, a comprehensive big data benchmark suite. Second, we apply a clustering technique to the principle components obtained from the PCA to investigate the similarity among big data workloads, and we verify the importance of including different software stacks for big data benchmarking. Third, we select seven representative big data workloads by removing redundant ones and release the BigDataBench simulation version, which is publicly available from http://prof.ict.ac.cn/BigDataBench/simulatorversion/.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures, 2014 IEEE International Symposium on Workload Characterizatio

ShenZhen transportation system (SZTS): a novel big data benchmark suite

Data analytics is at the core of the supply chain for both products and services in modern economies and societies. Big data workloads, however, are placing unprecedented demands on computing technologies, calling for a deep understanding and characterization of these emerging workloads. In this paper, we propose ShenZhen Transportation System (SZTS), a novel big data Hadoop benchmark suite comprised of real-life transportation analysis applications with real-life input data sets from Shenzhen in China. SZTS uniquely focuses on a specific and real-life application domain whereas other existing Hadoop benchmark suites, such as HiBench and CloudRank-D, consist of generic algorithms with synthetic inputs. We perform a cross-layer workload characterization at the microarchitecture level, the operating system (OS) level, and the job level, revealing unique characteristics of SZTS compared to existing Hadoop benchmarks as well as general-purpose multi-core PARSEC benchmarks. We also study the sensitivity of workload behavior with respect to input data size, and we propose a methodology for identifying representative input data sets