Big Data applications require real-time processing of complex computations on streaming and static information. Applications such as the diagnosis of power generating turbines require the integration of high velocity streaming and large volume of static data from multiple sources. In this paper we study various optimisations related to efficiently processing of streaming and static information. We introduce novel indexing structures for stream processing, a query-planner component that decides when their creation is beneficial, and we examine precomputed summarisations on archived measurements to accelerate streaming and static information processing. To put our ideas into practise, we have developed ExaStream, a data stream management system that is scalable, has declarative semantics, supports user defined functions, and allows efficient execution of complex analytical queries on streaming and static data. Our work is accompanied by an empirical evaluation of our optimisation techniques.

An increasing number of Web applications such as friends recommendation depend on the ability to join objects at scale. The traditional approach taken is nearest neighbor join (also called similarity join), whose goal is to find, based on a given join function, the closest set of objects or all the objects within a distance threshold to each object in the input. The scalability of techniques utilizing this approach often depends on the characteristics of the objects and the join function. However, many real-world join functions are intricately engineered and constantly evolving, which makes the design of white-box methods that rely on understanding the join function impractical. Finding a technique that can join extremely large number of objects with complex join functions has always been a tough challenge. In this paper, we propose a practical alternative approach called near neighbor join that, although does not find the closest neighbors, finds close neighbors, and can do so at extremely large scale when the join functions are complex. In particular, we design and implement a super-scalable system we name SAJ that is capable of best-effort joining of billions of objects for complex functions. Extensive experimental analysis over real-world large datasets shows that SAJ is scalable and generates good results.

Modern frameworks, such as Hadoop, combined with abundance of computing resources from the cloud, offer a significant opportunity to address long standing challenges in distributed processing. Infrastructure-as-a-Service clouds reduce the investment cost of renting a large data center while distributed processing frameworks are capable of efficiently harvesting the rented physical resources. Yet, the performance users get out of these resources varies greatly because the cloud hardware is shared by all users. The value for money cloud consumers achieve renders resource sharing policies a key player in both cloud performance and user satisfaction. In this paper, we employ microeconomics to direct the allotment of cloud resources for consumption in highly scalable master-worker virtual infrastructures. Our approach is developed on two premises: the cloud-consumer always has a budget and cloud physical resources are limited. Using our approach, the cloud administration is able to maximize per-user financial profit. We show that there is an equilibrium point at which our method achieves resource sharing proportional to each user's budget. Ultimately, this approach allows us to answer the question of how many resources a consumer should request from the seemingly endless pool provided by the cloud.

Scheduling data processing workflows (dataflows) on the cloud is a very complex and challenging task. It is essentially an optimization problem, very similar to query optimization, that is characteristically different from traditional problems in two aspects: Its space of alternative schedules is very rich, due to various optimization opportunities that cloud computing offers; its optimization criterion is at least two-dimensional, with monetary cost of using the cloud being at least as important as query completion time. In this paper, we study scheduling of dataflows that involve arbitrary data processing operators in the context of three different problems: 1) minimize completion time given a fixed budget, 2) minimize monetary cost given a deadline, and 3) find trade-offs between completion time and monetary cost without any a-priori constraints. We formulate these problems and present an approximate optimization framework to address them that uses resource elasticity in the cloud. To investigate the effectiveness of our approach, we incorporate the devised framework into a prototype system for dataflow evaluation and instantiate it with several greedy, probabilistic, and exhaustive search algorithms. Finally, through several experiments that we have conducted with the prototype elastic optimizer on numerous scientific and synthetic dataflows, we identify several interesting general characteristics of the space of alternative schedules as well as the advantages and disadvantages of the various search algorithms. The overall results are quite promising and indicate the effectiveness of our approach.