Building Efficient Large-Scale Big Data Processing Platforms

In the era of big data, many cluster platforms and resource management schemes are created to satisfy the increasing demands on processing a large volume of data. A general setting of big data processing jobs consists of multiple stages, and each stage represents generally defined data operation such as ltering and sorting. To parallelize the job execution in a cluster, each stage includes a number of identical tasks that can be concurrently launched at multiple servers. Practical clusters often involve hundreds or thousands of servers processing a large batch of jobs. Resource management, that manages cluster resource allocation and job execution, is extremely critical for the system performance. Generally speaking, there are three main challenges in resource management of the new big data processing systems. First, while there are various pending tasks from dierent jobs and stages, it is difficult to determine which ones deserve the priority to obtain the resources for execution, considering the tasks\u27 different characteristics such as resource demand and execution time. Second, there exists dependency among the tasks that can be concurrently running. For any two consecutive stages of a job, the output data of the former stage is the input data of the later one. The resource management has to comply with such dependency. The third challenge is the inconsistent performance of the cluster nodes. In practice, run-time performance of every server is varying. The resource management needs to dynamically adjust the resource allocation according to the performance change of each server. The resource management in the existing platforms and prior work often rely on fixed user-specific configurations, and assumes consistent performance in each node. The performance, however, is not satisfactory under various workloads. This dissertation aims to explore new approaches to improving the eciency of large-scale big data processing platforms. In particular, the run-time dynamic factors are carefully considered when the system allocates the resources. New algorithms are developed to collect run-time data and predict the characteristics of jobs and the cluster. We further develop resource management schemes that dynamically tune the resource allocation for each stage of every running job in the cluster. New findings and techniques in this dissertation will certainly provide valuable and inspiring insights to other similar problems in the research community

Using a Tunable Knob for reducing Makespan of MapReduce Jobs in a Hadoop Cluster

The MapReduce framework and its open source implementation Hadoop have become the defacto platform for scalable analysis on large data sets in recent years. One of the primary concerns in Hadoop is how to minimize the completion length (i.e., makespan) of a set of MapReduce jobs. The current Hadoop only allows static slot configuration, i.e., fixed numbers of map slots and reduce slots throughout the lifetime of a cluster. However, we found that such a static configuration may lead to low system resource utilizations as well as long completion length. Motivated by this, we propose a simple yet effective scheme which uses slot ratio between map and reduce tasks as a tunable knob for reducing the makespan of a given set. By leveraging the workload information of recently completed jobs, our scheme dynamically allocates resources (or slots) to map and reduce tasks. We implemented the presented scheme in Hadoop V0.20.2 and evaluated it with representative MapReduce benchmarks at Amazon EC2. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our scheme under both simple workloads and more complex mixed workloads