MapReduce and Hadoop represent an economically compelling alternative for efficient large scale data processing and advanced analytics in the enterprise. There is an increasing number of MapReduce applications associated with live business intelligence that require completion time guarantees (SLOs). There is a lack of performance models and workload analysis tools for automated performance management of such MapReduce jobs. None of the existing Hadoop schedulers support completion time guarantees. A key challenge in shared MapReduce clusters is the ability to automatically tailor and control resource allocations to different applications for achieving their performance SLOs.

SLOs stands for Service Level Objectives and routinely used for defining a set of performance goals.

We have a few research threads that we pursue. They are inter-related through the set of performance tools and models that we have designed: our MapReduce job profiling approach and a set of novel performance models.

SLO-based scheduler for Hadoop
In this work, we propose a framework, called ARIA, to address this problem. It comprises of three inter-related components. First, for a production job that is routinely executed on a new dataset, we build a job profile that compactly summarizes critical performance characteristics of the underlying application during the map and reduce stages. Second, we design a MapReduce performance model, that for a given job (with a known profile) and its SLO (soft deadline), estimates the amount of resources required for job completion within the deadline. Finally, we implement a novel SLO-based scheduler in Hadoop that determines job ordering and the amount of resources to allocate for meeting the job deadlines. We validate our approach using a set of realistic applications. The new scheduler effectively meets the jobs' SLOs until the job demands exceed the cluster resources. The results of the extensive simulation study are validated through detailed experiments on a 66-node Hadoop cluster.

Right-Sizing of Resource Allocation for MapReduce Apps
Cloud computing offers an attractive option for businesses to rent a suitable size Hadoop cluster, consume resources as a service, and pay only for resources that were utilized. One of the open questions in such environments is the amount of resources that a user should lease from the service provider. In this work, we outline a novel framework for SLO-driven resource provisioning and sizing of MapReduce jobs. First, we propose an automated profiling tool that extracts a compact job profile from the past application run(s) or by executing it on a smaller data set. Then, by applying a linear regression technique, we derive scaling factors to accurately project the application performance when processing a larger dataset. Moreover, we design a model for estimating the impact of node failures on a job completion time to evaluate worst case scenarios.

MapReduce Simulator SimMR
To ease the task of evaluating and comparing different provisioning and scheduling approaches in MapReduce environments, we have designed and implemented a simulation environment SimMR which is comprised of three inter-related components: i) Trace Generator that creates a replayable MapReduce workload; ii) Simulator Engine that accurately emulates the job master functionality in Hadoop; and iii) a pluggable scheduling policy that dictates the scheduler decisions on job ordering and the amount of resources allocated to different jobs over time.

Related Papers and Reports

• A. Verma, L. Cherkasova, V. S. Kumar, R. Campbell: Deadline-based Workload Management for MapReduce Environments: Pieces of the Perfromance Puzzle. Will appear in Proc. of the IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium (NOMS'2012), Maui, Hawaii, USA, April, 16-20, 2012.

• A. Verma, L. Cherkasova, R. Campbell: Resource Provisioning Framework for MapReduce Jobs with Performance Goals. Proc. of the ACM/IFIP/USENIX 12th International Middleware Conference (Middleware'2011), Lisboa, Portugal, December 12-16, 2011.

• A. Verma, L. Cherkasova, V. S. Kumar, R. Campbell: Three Pieces of the MapReduce Workload Management Puzzle. Poster at the 23d ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles (SOSP'2011), Cascais, Portugal, Oct. 23-26, 2011. Presentation Poster pdf

• A. Verma, L. Cherkasova, R. Campbell: Play It Again, SimMR! Proc. of the IEEE Cluster 2011 (Cluster'2011), Austin, Texas, USA, September 26-30, 2011.

• A. Verma, L. Cherkasova, R. Campbell: SLO-Driven Right-Sizing and Resource Provisioning of MapReduce Jobs. Proc. of the 5th Workshop on Large Scale Distributed Systems and Middleware (LADIS'2011), held in conjunction with VLDB'2011, Seattle, Washington, Sept. 2-3, 2011.

• A. Verma, L. Cherkasova, R. Campbell: ARIA: Automatic Resource Inference a nd Allocation for MapReduce Environments. Proc. of the 8th IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC'2011), June 14-18, 2011, Karlsruhe, Germany.

• L. Cherkasova: Performance Modeling in MapReduce Environments: Challenges and Opportunities. Invited Talk at the 2nd ACM/SPEC International Conference on Perfromance Engineering (ICPE'11), March 14-16, 2011, Karlsruhe, Germany.

HP Labs Reports

• A. Verma, L. Cherkasova, R. Campbell: Resource Provisioning Framework for MapReduce Jobs with Performance Goals. HP Laboratories Report No. HPL-2011-173, 2011.

• A. Verma, L. Cherkasova, R. Campbell: Play It Again, SimMR! HP Laboratories Report No. HPL-2011-127, 2011.

• A. Verma, L. Cherkasova, R. Campbell: SLO-Driven Right-Sizing and Resource Provisioning of MapReduce Jobs. HP Laboratories Report No. HPL-2011-126, 2011.

• A. Verma, L. Cherkasova, R. Campbell: ARIA: Automatic Resource Inference and Allocation for MapReduce Environments. HP Laboratories Report No. HPL-2011-58, 2011.