MapReduce is a distributed computing paradigm widely used for building large-scale data processing applications. When used in cloud environments, MapReduce clusters are dynamically created using virtual machines (VMs) and managed by the cloud provider. In this paper, we study the energy efficiency problem for such MapReduce clouds. We describe a unique spatio-temporal tradeoff that includes efficient spatial fitting of VMs on servers to achieve high utilization of machine resources, as well as balanced temporal fitting of servers with VMs having similar runtimes to ensure a server runs at a high utilization throughout its uptime. We propose VM placement algorithms that explicitly incorporate these tradeoffs. Further, we propose techniques that dynamically scale MapReduce clusters to further improve energy consumption while ensuring that jobs meet or improve their expected runtimes. Our algorithms achieve energy savings over existing placement techniques, and an additional optimization technique further achieves savings while simultaneously improving job performance.

MapReduce is a distributed computing paradigm widely used for building large-scale data processing applications. When used in cloud environments, MapReduce clusters are dynamically created using virtual machines (VMs) and managed by the cloud provider. In this paper, we study the energy efficiency problem for such MapReduce clusters in private cloud environments, that are characterized by repeated, batch execution of jobs. We describe a unique spatio-temporal tradeoff that includes efficient spatial fitting of VMs on servers to achieve high utilization of machine resources, as well as balanced temporal fitting of servers with VMs having similar runtimes to ensure a server runs at a high utilization throughout its uptime. We propose VM placement algorithms that explicitly incorporate these tradeoffs. Our algorithms achieve energy savings over existing placement techniques, and an additional optimization technique further achieves savings while simultaneously improving job performance.

MapReduce has gained in popularity as a distributed data analysis paradigm, particularly in the cloud, where MapReduce jobs are run on virtual clusters. The provisioning of MapReduce jobs in the cloud is an important problem for optimizing several user as well as provider-side metrics, such as runtime, cost, throughput, energy, and load. In this paper, we present an intelligent provisioning framework called STEAMEngine that consists of provisioning algorithms to optimize these metrics through a set of common building blocks. These building blocks enable spatio-temporal tradeoffs unique to MapReduce provisioning: along with their resource requirements (spatial component), a MapReduce job runtime (temporal component) is a critical element for any provisioning algorithm. We also describe tw o novel provisioning algorithms - a user-driven performance optimization and a provider-driven energy optimization - that leverage these building blocks. Our experimental results based on an Amazon EC2 cluster and a local Xen/Hadoop cluster show the benefits of STEAMEngine through improvements in performance and energy via the use of these algorithms and building blocks.

Resource discovery is an important process for finding suitable nodes that satisfy application requirements in large loosely coupled distributed systems. Besides internode heterogeneity, many of these systems also show a high degree of intranode dynamism, so that selecting nodes based only on their recently observed resource capacities can lead to poor deployment decisions resulting in application failures or migration overheads. However, most existing resource discovery mechanisms rely mainly on recent observations to achieve scalability in large systems. In this paper, we propose the notion of a resource bundle-a representative resource usage distribution for a group of nodes with similar resource usage patterns-that employs two complementary techniques to overcome the limitations of existing techniques: resource usage histograms to provide statistical guarantees for resource capacities and clustering-based resource aggregation to achieve scalability. Using trace-driven simulations and data analysis of a month-long PlanetLab trace, we show that resource bundles are able to provide high accuracy for statistical resource discovery, while achieving high scalability. We also show that resource bundles are ideally suited for identifying group-level characteristics (e.g., hot spots, total group capacity). To automatically parameterize the bundling algorithm, we present an adaptive algorithm that can detect online fluctuations in resource heterogeneity.

Virtualization technologies like VMware and Xen provide features to specify the minimum and maximum amount of resources that can be allocated to a virtual machine (VM) and a shares based mechanism for the hypervisor to distribute spare resources among contending VMs. However much of the existing work on VM placement and power consolidation in data centers fails to take advantage of these features. One of our experiments on a real testbed shows that leveraging such features can improve the overall utility of the data center by 47% or even higher. Motivated by these, we present a novel suite of techniques for placement and power consolidation of VMs in data centers taking advantage of the min-max and shares features inherent in virtualization technologies. Our techniques provide a smooth mechanism for power-performance tradeoffs in modern data centers running heterogeneous applications, wherein the amount of resources allocated to a VM can be adjusted based on available resources, power costs, and application utilities. We evaluate our techniques on a range of large synthetic data center setups and a small real data center testbed comprising of VMware ESX servers. Our experiments confirm the end-to-end validity of our approach and demonstrate that our final candidate algorithm, PowerExpandMinMax, consistently yields the best overall utility across a broad spectrum of inputs - varying VM sizes and utilities, varying server capacities and varying power costs - thus providing a practical solution for administrators.

Resource discovery enables applications deployed in heterogeneous large-scale distributed systems to find resources that meet QoS requirements. In particular, most applications need resource requirements to be satisfied simultaneously for multiple resources (such as CPU, memory and network bandwidth). Due to dynamism in many large-scale systems, providing statistical guarantees on such requirements is important to avoid application failures and overheads. However, existing techniques either provide guarantees only for individual resources, or take a static or memoryless approach along multiple dimensions. We present HiDRA, a scalable resource discovery technique providing statistical guarantees for resource requirements spanning multiple dimensions simultaneously. Through trace analysis and a 307-node PlanetLab implementation, we show that HiDRA, while using over 1,400 times less data, performs nearly as well as a fully-informed algorithm, showing better precision and having recall within 3%. We demonstrate that HiDRA is a feasible, low-overhead approach to statistical resource discovery in a distributed system.

Resource discovery is an important process for finding suitable nodes that satisfy application requirements in large loosely-coupled distributed systems. Besides inter-node heterogeneity, many of these systems also show a high degree of intra-node dynamism, so that selecting nodes based only on their recently observed resource capacities for scalability reasons can lead to poor deployment decisions resulting in application failures or migration overheads. In this paper, we propose the notion of a resource bundle - a representative resource usage distribution for a group of nodes with similar resource usage patterns - that employs two complementary techniques to overcome the limitations of existing techniques: resource usage histograms to provide statistical guarantees for resource capacities, and clustering-based resource aggregation to achieve scalability. Using trace-driven simulations and data analysis of a month-long Planet Lab trace, we show that resource bundles are able to provide high accuracy for statistical resource discovery (up to 56% better precision than using only recent values), while achieving high scalability (up to 55% fewer messages than a non-aggregation algorithm). We also show that resource bundles are ideally suited for identifying group-level characteristics such as finding load hot spots and estimating total group capacity (within 8% of actual values).