Node Architecture Implications for In-Memory Data Analytics on Scale-in Clusters

While cluster computing frameworks are continuously evolving to provide real-time data analysis capabilities, Apache Spark has managed to be at the forefront of big data analytics. Recent studies propose scale-in clusters with in-storage processing devices to process big data analytics with Spark However the proposal is based solely on the memory bandwidth characterization of in-memory data analytics and also does not shed light on the specification of host CPU and memory. Through empirical evaluation of in-memory data analytics with Apache Spark on an Ivy Bridge dual socket server, we have found that (i) simultaneous multi-threading is effective up to 6 cores (ii) data locality on NUMA nodes can improve the performance by 10% on average, (iii) disabling next-line L1-D prefetchers can reduce the execution time by up to 14%, (iv) DDR3 operating at 1333 MT/s is sufficient and (v) multiple small executors can provide up to 36% speedup over single large executor.