EN FR
EN FR


Section: New Results

Fault tolerant data processing

Fast recovery

Participants : Orçun Yildiz, Shadi Ibrahim, Gabriel Antoniu.

Hadoop has emerged as a prominent tool for Big Data processing in large-scale clouds. Failures are inevitable in large-scale systems, especially in shared environments. Consequently, Hadoop was designed with hardware failures in mind. In particular, Hadoop handles machine failures by re-executing all the tasks of the failed machine. Unfortunately, the efforts to handle failures are entirely entrusted to the core of Hadoop and hidden from Hadoop schedulers. This may prevent Hadoop schedulers from meeting their objectives (e.g., fairness, job priority, performance) and can significantly impact the performance of the applications.

In our previous work, we addressed this issue through the design and implementation of a new scheduling strategy called Chronos. Chronos is conductive to improving the performance of Map-Reduce applications by enabling an early action upon failure detection. Chronos tries to launch recovery tasks immediately by preempting tasks belonging to low priority jobs, thus avoiding to wait until slots are freed.

In [20], we further investigated the potential benefit of launching local recovery tasks by implementing and evaluating Chronos*. To this end, we slightly changed the smart slot allocation strategy of Chronos into aggressive slot allocation strategy. With Chronos, recovery tasks with higher priority would preempt the selected tasks with less priority. With Chronos*, we also allow recovery tasks to preempt the selected tasks with the same priority (e.g., recovery tasks belonging to the same job with selected tasks). The experimental results indicate that Chronos* results in 100 % locality execution for recovery tasks thanks to its aggressive slot allocation strategy. Moreover, Chronos* improves the completion time of the jobs by up to 17 %.

Dynamic replica placement

Participants : Pierre Matri, Alexandru Costan, Gabriel Antoniu.

Large-scale applications are ever-increasingly geo-distributed. Maintaining the highest possible data locality is crucial to ensure high performance of such applications. Dynamic replication addresses this problem by dynamically creating replicas of frequently accessed data close to the clients. This data is often stored in decentralized storage systems such as Dynamo or Voldemort, which offer support for mutable data.

However, existing approaches to dynamic replication for such mutable data remain centralized, thus incompatible with these systems. We introduce a write-enabled dynamic replication scheme that leverages the decentralized architecture of such storage systems. We propose an algorithm enabling clients to locate tentatively the closest data replica without prior request to any metadata node. Large-scale experiments show a read latency decrease of up to 42% compared to other state-of-the-art, caching-based solutions.

Collaboration.

This work was done in collaboration with María Pérez, UPM, Spain.