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Machine Learning for Performance Prediction of Spark Cloud Applications

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing 2021-08-30 v1 Performance

Abstract

Big data applications and analytics are employed in many sectors for a variety of goals: improving customers satisfaction, predicting market behavior or improving processes in public health. These applications consist of complex software stacks that are often run on cloud systems. Predicting execution times is important for estimating the cost of cloud services and for effectively managing the underlying resources at runtime. Machine Learning (ML), providing black box solutions to model the relationship between application performance and system configuration without requiring in-detail knowledge of the system, has become a popular way of predicting the performance of big data applications. We investigate the cost-benefits of using supervised ML models for predicting the performance of applications on Spark, one of today's most widely used frameworks for big data analysis. We compare our approach with \textit{Ernest} (an ML-based technique proposed in the literature by the Spark inventors) on a range of scenarios, application workloads, and cloud system configurations. Our experiments show that Ernest can accurately estimate the performance of very regular applications, but it fails when applications exhibit more irregular patterns and/or when extrapolating on bigger data set sizes. Results show that our models match or exceed Ernest's performance, sometimes enabling us to reduce the prediction error from 126-187% to only 5-19%.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2108.12214,
  title  = {Machine Learning for Performance Prediction of Spark Cloud Applications},
  author = {Alexandre Maros and Fabricio Murai and Ana Paula Couto da Silva and Jussara M. Almeida and Marco Lattuada and Eugenio Gianniti and Marjan Hosseini and Danilo Ardagna},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2108.12214},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

Published in 2019 IEEE 12th International Conference on Cloud Computing (CLOUD)

R2 v1 2026-06-24T05:28:01.651Z