Emerging scale-out workloads require extensive amounts of computational resources. However, data centers using modern server hardware face physical constraints in space and power, limiting further expansion and calling for improvements in the computational density per server and in the per-operation energy. Continuing to improve the computational resources of the cloud while staying within physical constraints mandates optimizing server efficiency to ensure that server hardware closely matches the needs of scale-out workloads.In this work, we introduce CloudSuite, a benchmark suite of emerging scale-out workloads. We use performance counters on modern servers to study scale-out workloads, finding that today's predominant processor micro-architecture is inefficient for running these workloads. We find that inefficiency comes from the mismatch between the workload needs and modern processors, particularly in the organization of instruction and data memory systems and the processor core micro-architecture. Moreover, while today's predominant micro-architecture is inefficient when executing scale-out workloads, we find that continuing the current trends will further exacerbate the inefficiency in the future. In this work, we identify the key micro-architectural needs of scale-out workloads, calling for a change in the trajectory of server processors that would lead to improved computational density and power efficiency in data centers.

/pdf/clearing-the-clouds-a-study-of-emerging-scale-out-workloads-4tg9zvrf1a.pdf

Clearing the clouds: a study of emerging scale-out workloads on modern hardware

As architecture, systems, and data management communities pay greater attention to innovative big data systems and architecture, the pressure of benchmarking and evaluating these systems rises. However, the complexity, diversity, frequently changed workloads, and rapid evolution of big data systems raise great challenges in big data benchmarking. Considering the broad use of big data systems, for the sake of fairness, big data benchmarks must include diversity of data and workloads, which is the prerequisite for evaluating big data systems and architecture. Most of the state-of-the-art big data benchmarking efforts target evaluating specific types of applications or system software stacks, and hence they are not qualified for serving the purposes mentioned above.

http://prof.ict.ac.cn/BigDataBench/old/2.0/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Wang_BigDataBench.pdf

BigDataBench: A big data benchmark suite from internet services

MapReduce systems face enormous challenges due to increasing growth, diversity, and consolidation of the data and computation involved. Provisioning, configuring, and managing large-scale MapReduce clusters require realistic, workload-specific performance insights that existing MapReduce benchmarks are ill-equipped to supply. In this paper, we build the case for going beyond benchmarks for MapReduce performance evaluations. We analyze and compare two production MapReduce traces to develop a vocabulary for describing MapReduce workloads. We show that existing benchmarks fail to capture rich workload characteristics observed in traces, and propose a framework to synthesize and execute representative workloads. We demonstrate that performance evaluations using realistic workloads gives cluster operator new ways to identify workload-specific resource bottlenecks, and workload-specific choice of MapReduce task schedulers. We expect that once available, workload suites would allow cluster operators to accomplish previously challenging tasks beyond what we can now imagine, thus serving as a useful tool to help design and manage MapReduce systems.

http://yanpeichen.com/professional/MapReduceWorkloadMASCOTSCameraReady.pdf

The Case for Evaluating MapReduce Performance Using Workload Suites

Elasticity is a fundamental property in cloud computing that has recently witnessed major developments This article reviews both classical and recent elasticity solutions and provides an overview of containerization, a new technological trend in lightweight virtualization It also discusses major issues and research challenges related to elasticity in cloud computing We comprehensively review and analyze the proposals developed in this field We provide a taxonomy of elasticity mechanisms according to the identified works and key properties Compared to other works in literature, this article presents a broader and detailed analysis of elasticity approaches and is considered as the first survey addressing the elasticity of containers

/pdf/elasticity-in-cloud-computing-state-of-the-art-and-research-32fme9yoqc.pdf

Elasticity in Cloud Computing: State of the Art and Research Challenges

Reliable performance evaluations require the use of representative workloads. This is no easy task since modern computer systems and their workloads are complex, with many interrelated attributes and complicated structures. Experts often use sophisticated mathematics to analyze and describe workload models, making these models difficult for practitioners to grasp. This book aims to close this gap by emphasizing the intuition and the reasoning behind the definitions and derivations related to the workload models. It provides numerous examples from real production systems, with hundreds of graphs. Using this book, readers will be able to analyze collected workload data and clean it if necessary, derive statistical models that include skewed marginal distributions and correlations, and consider the need for generative models and feedback from the system. The descriptive statistics techniques covered are also useful for other domains.

Workload Modeling for Computer Systems Performance Evaluation

The MapReduce model is becoming prominent for the large-scale data analysis in the cloud. In this paper, we present the benchmarking, evaluation and characterization of Hadoop, an open-source implementation of MapReduce. We first introduce HiBench, a new benchmark suite for Hadoop. It consists of a set of Hadoop programs, including both synthetic micro-benchmarks and real-world Hadoop applications. We then evaluate and characterize the Hadoop framework using HiBench, in terms of speed (i.e., job running time), throughput (i.e., the number of tasks completed per minute), HDFS bandwidth, system resource (e.g., CPU, memory and I/O) utilizations, and data access patterns.

The HiBench benchmark suite: Characterization of the MapReduce-based data analysis

We have conducted intensive experiments on an in-house Hadoop cluster using HDFSbench (a file system benchmark tool we build for HDFS). Our experimental results provide valuable insights into the performance characteristics (e.g., general efficiency and potential bottlenecks) of cloud file systems for different application usages (e.g., MapReduce and Bigtable access patterns), and on how these traits change with new storage technologies (e.g., SSD vs. HDD).

Tao Xie

Papers

The HiBench benchmark suite: Characterization of the MapReduce-based data analysis

HDFSbench: Understanding the Efficiency and Bottlenecks of Cloud File Systems