Only Aggressive Elephants are Fast Elephants

Yellow elephants are slow. A major reason is that they consume their inputs entirely before responding to an elephant rider's orders. Some clever riders have trained their yellow elephants to only consume parts of the inputs before responding. However, the teaching time to make an elephant do that is high. So high that the teaching lessons often do not pay off. We take a different approach. We make elephants aggressive; only this will make them very fast. We propose HAIL (Hadoop Aggressive Indexing Library), an enhancement of HDFS and Hadoop MapReduce that dramatically improves runtimes of several classes of MapReduce jobs. HAIL changes the upload pipeline of HDFS in order to create different clustered indexes on each data block replica. An interesting feature of HAIL is that we typically create a win-win situation: we improve both data upload to HDFS and the runtime of the actual Hadoop MapReduce job. In terms of data upload, HAIL improves over HDFS by up to 60% with the default replication factor of three. In terms of query execution, we demonstrate that HAIL runs up to 68x faster than Hadoop. In our experiments, we use six clusters including physical and EC2 clusters of up to 100 nodes. A series of scalability experiments also demonstrates the superiority of HAIL.Comment: VLDB201

Efficient Processing of k Nearest Neighbor Joins using MapReduce

k nearest neighbor join (kNN join), designed to find k nearest neighbors from a dataset S for every object in another dataset R, is a primitive operation widely adopted by many data mining applications. As a combination of the k nearest neighbor query and the join operation, kNN join is an expensive operation. Given the increasing volume of data, it is difficult to perform a kNN join on a centralized machine efficiently. In this paper, we investigate how to perform kNN join using MapReduce which is a well-accepted framework for data-intensive applications over clusters of computers. In brief, the mappers cluster objects into groups; the reducers perform the kNN join on each group of objects separately. We design an effective mapping mechanism that exploits pruning rules for distance filtering, and hence reduces both the shuffling and computational costs. To reduce the shuffling cost, we propose two approximate algorithms to minimize the number of replicas. Extensive experiments on our in-house cluster demonstrate that our proposed methods are efficient, robust and scalable.Comment: VLDB201

D-SPACE4Cloud: A Design Tool for Big Data Applications

The last years have seen a steep rise in data generation worldwide, with the development and widespread adoption of several software projects targeting the Big Data paradigm. Many companies currently engage in Big Data analytics as part of their core business activities, nonetheless there are no tools and techniques to support the design of the underlying hardware configuration backing such systems. In particular, the focus in this report is set on Cloud deployed clusters, which represent a cost-effective alternative to on premises installations. We propose a novel tool implementing a battery of optimization and prediction techniques integrated so as to efficiently assess several alternative resource configurations, in order to determine the minimum cost cluster deployment satisfying QoS constraints. Further, the experimental campaign conducted on real systems shows the validity and relevance of the proposed method

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

Partial Replica Location And Selection For Spatial Datasets

As the size of scientific datasets continues to grow, we will not be able to store enormous datasets on a single grid node, but must distribute them across many grid nodes. The implementation of partial or incomplete replicas, which represent only a subset of a larger dataset, has been an active topic of research. Partial Spatial Replicas extend this functionality to spatial data, allowing us to distribute a spatial dataset in pieces over several locations. We investigate solutions to the partial spatial replica selection problems. First, we describe and develop two designs for an Spatial Replica Location Service (SRLS), which must return the set of replicas that intersect with a query region. Integrating a relational database, a spatial data structure and grid computing software, we build a scalable solution that works well even for several million replicas. In our SRLS, we have improved performance by designing a R-tree structure in the backend database, and by aggregating several queries into one larger query, which reduces overhead. We also use the Morton Space-filling Curve during R-tree construction, which improves spatial locality. In addition, we describe R-tree Prefetching(RTP), which effectively utilizes the modern multi-processor architecture. Second, we present and implement a fast replica selection algorithm in which a set of partial replicas is chosen from a set of candidates so that retrieval performance is maximized. Using an R-tree based heuristic algorithm, we achieve O(n log n) complexity for this NP-complete problem. We describe a model for disk access performance that takes filesystem prefetching into account and is sufficiently accurate for spatial replica selection. Making a few simplifying assumptions, we present a fast replica selection algorithm for partial spatial replicas. The algorithm uses a greedy approach that attempts to maximize performance by choosing a collection of replica subsets that allow fast data retrieval by a client machine. Experiments show that the performance of the solution found by our algorithm is on average always at least 91% and 93.4% of the performance of the optimal solution in 4-node and 8-node tests respectively

A Taxonomy of Data Grids for Distributed Data Sharing, Management and Processing

Data Grids have been adopted as the platform for scientific communities that need to share, access, transport, process and manage large data collections distributed worldwide. They combine high-end computing technologies with high-performance networking and wide-area storage management techniques. In this paper, we discuss the key concepts behind Data Grids and compare them with other data sharing and distribution paradigms such as content delivery networks, peer-to-peer networks and distributed databases. We then provide comprehensive taxonomies that cover various aspects of architecture, data transportation, data replication and resource allocation and scheduling. Finally, we map the proposed taxonomy to various Data Grid systems not only to validate the taxonomy but also to identify areas for future exploration. Through this taxonomy, we aim to categorise existing systems to better understand their goals and their methodology. This would help evaluate their applicability for solving similar problems. This taxonomy also provides a "gap analysis" of this area through which researchers can potentially identify new issues for investigation. Finally, we hope that the proposed taxonomy and mapping also helps to provide an easy way for new practitioners to understand this complex area of research.Comment: 46 pages, 16 figures, Technical Repor

Distributed Caching for Processing Raw Arrays

As applications continue to generate multi-dimensional data at exponentially increasing rates, fast analytics to extract meaningful results is becoming extremely important. The database community has developed array databases that alleviate this problem through a series of techniques. In-situ mechanisms provide direct access to raw data in the original format---without loading and partitioning. Parallel processing scales to the largest datasets. In-memory caching reduces latency when the same data are accessed across a workload of queries. However, we are not aware of any work on distributed caching of multi-dimensional raw arrays. In this paper, we introduce a distributed framework for cost-based caching of multi-dimensional arrays in native format. Given a set of files that contain portions of an array and an online query workload, the framework computes an effective caching plan in two stages. First, the plan identifies the cells to be cached locally from each of the input files by continuously refining an evolving R-tree index. In the second stage, an optimal assignment of cells to nodes that collocates dependent cells in order to minimize the overall data transfer is determined. We design cache eviction and placement heuristic algorithms that consider the historical query workload. A thorough experimental evaluation over two real datasets in three file formats confirms the superiority - by as much as two orders of magnitude - of the proposed framework over existing techniques in terms of cache overhead and workload execution time

Hardware Acceleration for Unstructured Big Data and Natural Language Processing.

The confluence of the rapid growth in electronic data in recent years, and the renewed interest in domain-specific hardware accelerators presents exciting technical opportunities. Traditional scale-out solutions for processing the vast amounts of text data have been shown to be energy- and cost-inefficient. In contrast, custom hardware accelerators can provide higher throughputs, lower latencies, and significant energy savings. In this thesis, I present a set of hardware accelerators for unstructured big-data processing and natural language processing. The first accelerator, called HAWK, aims to speed up the processing of ad hoc queries against large in-memory logs. HAWK is motivated by the observation that traditional software-based tools for processing large text corpora use memory bandwidth inefficiently due to software overheads, and, thus, fall far short of peak scan rates possible on modern memory systems. HAWK is designed to process data at a constant rate of 32 GB/s—faster than most extant memory systems. I demonstrate that HAWK outperforms state-of-the-art software solutions for text processing, almost by an order of magnitude in many cases. HAWK occupies an area of 45 sq-mm in its pareto-optimal configuration and consumes 22 W of power, well within the area and power envelopes of modern CPU chips. The second accelerator I propose aims to speed up similarity measurement calculations for semantic search in the natural language processing space. By leveraging the latency hiding concepts of multi-threading and simple scheduling mechanisms, my design maximizes functional unit utilization. This similarity measurement accelerator provides speedups of 36x-42x over optimized software running on server-class cores, while requiring 56x-58x lower energy, and only 1.3% of the area.PhDComputer Science and EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/116712/1/prateekt_1.pd