High-performance design of apache spark with RDMA and its benefits on various workloads

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Abstract

The in-memory data processing framework, Apache Spark, has been stealing the limelight for low-latency interactive applications, iterative and batch computations. Our early experience study [17] has shown that Apache Spark can be enhanced to leverage advanced features (e.g., RDMA) on high-performance networks (e.g., InfiniBand and RoCE) to improve the performance of shuffle phase. With the fast evolving of the Apache Spark ecosystem, the Spark architecture has been changing a lot. This motivates us to investigate whether the earlier RDMA design can be adapted and further enhanced for the new Apache Spark architecture. We also aim to improve the performance for various Spark workloads (e.g., Batch, Graph, SQL). In this paper, we present a detailed design for high-performance RDMA-based Apache Spark on high-performance networks. We conduct systematic performance evaluations on three modern clusters (Chameleon, SDSC Comet, and an in-house cluster) with cutting-edge InfiniBand technologies, such as latest IB EDR (100 Gbps) network, recently introduced Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) technology for IB, etc. The evaluation results show that compared to the default Spark running with IP over InfiniBand (IPoIB), our proposed design can achieve up to 79% performance improvement for Spark RDD operation benchmarks (e.g., GroupBy, SortBy), up to 38% performance improvement for batch workloads (e.g., Sort and TeraSort in Intel HiBench), up to 46% performance improvement for graph processing workloads (e.g., PageRank), up to 32% performance improvement for SQL queries (e.g., Aggregation, Join) on varied scales (up to 1,536 cores) of bare-metal IB clusters. Performance evaluations on SR-IOV enabled IB clusters also show 37% improvement achieved by our RDMA-based design. Our RDMA-based Spark design is implemented as a pluggable module and it does not change any Spark APIs, which means that it can be combined with other existing enhanced designs for Apache Spark and Hadoop proposed in the community. To show this, we further evaluate the performance of a combined version of `RDMA-Spark+RDMA-HDFS' and the numbers show that the combination can achieve the best performance with up to 82% improvement for Intel HiBench Sort and TeraSort on SDSC Comet cluster.

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