Performance Evaluation of Job Scheduling and Resource Allocation in Apache Spark

Abstract

Advancements in data acquisition techniques and devices are revolutionizing the way image data are collected, managed and processed. Devices such as time-lapse cameras and multispectral cameras generate large amount of image data daily. Therefore, there is a clear need for many organizations and researchers to deal with large volume of image data efficiently. On the other hand, Big Data processing on distributed systems such as Apache Spark are gaining popularity in recent years. Apache Spark is a widely used in-memory framework for distributed processing of large datasets on a cluster of inexpensive computers. This thesis proposes using Spark for distributed processing of large amount of image data in a time efficient manner. However, to share cluster resources efficiently, multiple image processing applications submitted to the cluster must be appropriately scheduled by Spark cluster managers to take advantage of all the compute power and storage capacity of the cluster. Spark can run on three cluster managers including Standalone, Mesos and YARN, and provides several configuration parameters that control how resources are allocated and scheduled. Using default settings for these multiple parameters is not enough to efficiently share cluster resources between multiple applications running concurrently. This leads to performance issues and resource underutilization because cluster administrators and users do not know which Spark cluster manager is the right fit for their applications and how the scheduling behaviour and parameter settings of these cluster managers affect the performance of their applications in terms of resource utilization and response times.

This thesis parallelized a set of heterogeneous image processing applications including Image Registration, Flower Counter and Image Clustering, and presents extensive comparisons and analyses of running these applications on a large server and a Spark cluster using three different cluster managers for resource allocation, including Standalone, Apache Mesos and Hodoop YARN. In addition, the thesis examined the two different job scheduling and resource allocations modes available in Spark: static and dynamic allocation. Furthermore, the thesis explored the various configurations available on both modes that control speculative execution of tasks, resource size and the number of parallel tasks per job, and explained their impact on image processing applications. The thesis aims to show that using optimal values for these parameters reduces jobs makespan, maximizes cluster utilization, and ensures each application is allocated a fair share of cluster resources in a timely manner.