Doppio: I/O-Aware Performance Analysis, Modeling and Optimization for In-Memory Computing Framework(🔥Best Paper Nominee)

Abstract

In conventional Hadoop MapReduce applications, I/O used to play a heavy role in the overall system performance. More recently, a study from the Apache Spark community—state-of-the-art in-memory cluster computing framework—reports that I/O is no longer the bottleneck and has a marginal performance impact on applications like SQL processing. However, we observe that simply replacing HDDs with SSDs in a Spark cluster can have over 10x performance improvement for certain stages in large-scale production-quality genome processing. Therefore, one key question arises: How does I/O quantitatively impact the performance of today’s big data applications developed using in-memory cluster computing frameworks like Apache Spark? In this paper we select an important yet complex application—the Spark-based Genome Analysis ToolKit (GATK4)—to guide our modeling. We first use different combinations of HDDs and SSDs to measure the I/O impact on GATK4 and change the CPU core number to discover the relation between computation and I/O access. Combining with Spark underlying implementations, we further analyze the inherent cause of the above observations and build our model based on the analysis. Although building upon GATK4, our model maintains generality to other applications. Experimental results show that we can achieve an performance prediction error rate within 10% for typical Spark applications of both iterative and shuffle-heavy algorithms. Finally, we further extend our model to a broader area - that of optimal configuration selection in the public cloud. In Google Cloud, our model enables us to save 38% to 57% cost for genome sequencing compared with its recommended default configurations. Currently, more and more companies are adopting cloud computing for specific workloads. Our proposed model can have a huge impact on their choices, while also enabling them to significantly reduce their costs.

Peipei Zhou

Assistant Professor of Engineering

My research interests include Customized Computer Architecture and Programming Abstraction for Health & AI Applications