CCA: Cost-Capacity-Aware Caching for In-Memory Data Analytics Frameworks

To process data from IoTs and wearable devices, analysis tasks are often offloaded to the cloud. As the amount of sensing data ever increases, optimizing the data analytics frameworks is critical to the performance of processing sensed data. A key approach to speed up the performance of data analytics frameworks in the cloud is caching intermediate data, which is used repeatedly in iterative computations. Existing analytics engines implement caching with various approaches. Some use run-time mechanisms with dynamic profiling and others rely on programmers to decide data to cache. Even though caching discipline has been investigated long enough in computer system research, recent data analytics frameworks still leave a room to optimize. As sophisticated caching should consider complex execution contexts such as cache capacity, size of data to cache, victims to evict, etc., no general solution often exists for data analytics frameworks. In this paper, we propose an application-specific cost-capacity-aware caching scheme for in-memory data analytics frameworks. We use a cost model, built from multiple representative inputs, and an execution flow analysis, extracted from DAG schedule, to select primary candidates to cache among intermediate data. After the caching candidate is determined, the optimal caching is automatically selected during execution even if the programmers no longer manually determine the caching for the intermediate data. We implemented our scheme in Apache Spark and experimentally evaluated our scheme on HiBench benchmarks. Compared to the caching decisions in the original benchmarks, our scheme increases the performance by 27% on sufficient cache memory and by 11% on insufficient cache memory, respectively.