Accelerating Big Data Analytics Using Scale-up/out Heterogeneous Clusters

Production data analytic workloads typically consist of a majority of jobs with small input data sizes and a small number of jobs with large input data sizes. Recent works advocate scale-up/scale-out heterogeneous clusters (in short Hybrid clusters) to handle these heterogeneous workloads, since scale-up machines (i.e., adding more resources to a single machine) can process small jobs faster than simply scaling out the cluster with cheap machines. However, there are several challenges for job placement and data placement to implement such a Hybrid cluster. In this paper, we propose a job placement strategy and a data placement strategy to solve the challenges. The job placement strategy places a job to either scale-up or scale-out machines based on the job's characteristics, and migrates jobs from scale-up machines to under-utilized scale-out machines to achieve load balance. The data placement strategy allocates data replicas in the two types of machines accordingly to increase the data locality in Hybrid cluster. We implemented a Hybrid cluster on Apache YARN, and evaluated its performance using a Facebook production workload. With our proposed strategies, a Hybrid cluster can reduce the makespan of the workload up to 37% and the median job completion time up to 60%, compared to traditional scale-out clusters with state-of-the-art schedulers.