Current High Performance Computing (HPC) applications have seen an explosive growth in the size of data in recent years. Many application scientists have initiated efforts to integrate data-intensive computing into computational-intensive HPC facilities, particularly for data analytics. We have observed several scientific applications which must migrate their data from an HPC storage system to a data-intensive one for analytics. There is a gap between the data semantics of HPC storage and data-intensive system, hence, once migrated, the data must be further refined and reorganized. This reorganization must be performed before existing data-intensive tools such as MapReduce can be used to analyze data. This reorganization requires at least two complete scans through the data set and then at least one MapReduce program to prepare the data before analyzing it. Running multiple MapReduce phases causes significant overhead for the application, in the form of excessive I/O operations. That is for every MapReduce phase, a distributed read and write operation on the file system must be performed. Our contribution is to develop a MapReduce-based framework for HPC analytics to eliminate the multiple scans and also reduce the number of data preprocessing MapReduce programs. We also implement a data-centric scheduler to further improve the performance of HPC analytics MapReduce programs by maintaining the data locality. We have added additional expressiveness to the MapReduce language to allow application scientists to specify the logical semantics of their data such that 1) the data can be analyzed without running multiple data preprocessing MapReduce programs, and 2) the data can be simultaneously reorganized as it is migrated to the data-intensive file system. Using our augmented Map-Reduce system, MapReduce with Access Patterns (MRAP), we have demonstrated up to 33 percent throughput improvement in one real application, and up to 70 percent in an I/O kernel of another application. Our results for scheduling show up to 49 percent improvement for an I/O kernel of a prevalent HPC analysis application.

Due to the explosive growth in the size of scientific data sets, data-intensive computing is an emerging trend in computational science. Many application scientists are looking to integrate data-intensive computing into computational-intensive High Performance Computing facilities, particularly for data analytics. We have observed several scientific applications which must migrate their data from an HPC storage system to a data-intensive one. There is a gap between the data semantics of HPC storage and data-intensive system, hence, once migrated, the data must be further refined and reorganized. This reorganization requires at least two complete scans through the data set and then at least one MapReduce program to prepare the data before analyzing it. Running multiple MapReduce phases causes significant overhead for the application, in the form of excessive I/O operations. For every MapReduce application that must be run in order to complete the desired data analysis, a distributed read and write operation on the file system must be performed. Our contribution is to extend Map-Reduce to eliminate the multiple scans and also reduce the number of pre-processing MapReduce programs. We have added additional expressiveness to the MapReduce language to allow users to specify the logical semantics of their data such that 1) the data can be analyzed without running multiple data pre-processing MapReduce programs, and 2) the data can be simultaneously reorganized as it is migrated to the data-intensive file system. Using our augmented MapReduce system, MapReduce with Access Patterns (MRAP), we have demonstrated up to 33% throughput improvement in one real application, and up to 70% in an I/O kernel of another application.

The data generated by scientific simulation, sensor, monitor or optical telescope has increased with dramatic speed. In order to analyze the raw data fast and space efficiently, data pre-process operation is needed to achieve better performance in data analysis phase. Current research shows an increasing tread of adopting MapReduce framework for large scale data processing. However, the data access patterns which generally applied to scientific data set are not supported by current MapReduce framework directly. The gap between the requirement from analytics application and the property of MapReduce framework motivates us to provide support for these data access patterns in MapReduce framework. In our work, we studied the data access patterns in matrix files and proposed a new concentric data layout solution to facilitate matrix data access and analysis in MapReduce framework. Concentric data layout is a hierarchical data layout which maintains the dimensional property in large data sets. Contrary to the continuous data layout adopted in current Hadoop framework, concentric data layout stores the data from the same sub-matrix into one chunk, and then stores chunks symmetrically in a higher level. This matches well with the matrix like computation. The concentric data layout preprocesses the data beforehand, and optimizes the afterward run of MapReduce application. The experiments show that the concentric data layout improves the overall performance, reduces the execution time by about 38% when reading a 64 GB file. It also mitigates the unused data read overhead and increases the useful data efficiency by 32% on average.

Scientific applications are adapting HDFS/MapReduce to perform large scale data analytics. One of the major challenges is that an overabundance of small files is common in these applications, and HDFS manages all its files through a single server, the Namenode. It is anticipated that small files can significantly impact the performance of Namenode. In this work we propose a mechanism to store small files in HDFS efficiently and improve the space utilization for metadata. Our scheme is based on the assumption that each client is assigned a quota in the file system, for both the space and number of files. In our approach, we utilize the compression method ‘harballing', provided by Hadoop, to better utilize the HDFS. We provide for new job functionality to allow for in-job archival of directories and files so that running MapReduce programs may complete without being killed by the JobTracker due to quota policies. This approach leads to better functionality of metadata operations and more efficient usage of the HDFS. Our analysis results show that we can reduce the metadata footprint in main memory by a factor of 42.