DeepCAT+: A Low-Cost and Transferrable Online Configuration Auto-Tuning Approach for Big Data Frameworks(ICPP22,TPDS Revision)

Big data frameworks usually provide a large number of performance-related parameters. Online auto-tuning these parameters based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to achieve a better performance has shown their advantages over search-based and machine learning-based approaches. Unfortunately, the time cost during the online tuning phase of conventional DRL-based methods is still heavy, especially for big data applications. To reduce the total online tuning cost and increase the adaptability: 1) DeepCAT+ utilizes the TD3 algorithm instead of DDPG to alleviate value overestimation; 2) DeepCAT+ modifies the conventional experience replay to fully utilize the rare but valuable transitions via a novel reward-driven prioritized experience replay mechanism; 3) DeepCAT+ designs a Twin-Q Optimizer to estimate the execution time of each action without the costly configuration evaluation and optimize the sub-optimal ones to achieve a low-cost exploration-exploitation tradeoff; 4) Furthermore, DeepCAT+ also implements an Online Continual Learner module based on Progressive Neural Networks to transfer knowledge from historical tuning experiences.

New features in DeepCAT+ beyond ICPP22 Paper DeepCAT

Progressive Neural Networks (PNN) based Online Continual Learner to enhance the adaptability for dynamic workloads and hardware environments changes.

1. Log-based workload features extraction
2. PNN-based knowledge transfer

Start

Cluster deployment

1. Install Hadoop distributed environment and file system.
2. install the Spark computing framework.
3. Install and compile the hibench testing framework.
4. Install Ansible Playbook for batch configuration and automated deployment.

Steps for reproducing DeepCAT+’s Results

1. Data collection: collect offline exploration data, including cluster metric states, configuration values, rewards. The interaction between Python programs and clusters is conducted through Ansible tools, check target/target_spark/readme.md for more details.
2. Use the data to form memory pool for offline training and save the model, see offline_train() function in DeepCAT.py.
3. Use the model to tune configuration for big data frameworks using tune() in DeepCAT.py. Note there are two polcies:
   • if the workload is known, DeepCAT+ will direct conduct optimization, details in DeepCAT.py.
   • if the workload is unknown, DeepCAT+ will use Progressive Neural Networks for continual learning to enhence it's adaptability, details in DeepCAT_with_PNN.py.
4. Compare DeepCAT with CDBTune, OtterTune and Qtune baselines.

Environment Version

• Hadoop 2.7.3
• Spark 2.2.2
• Hibench 7.0
• Ansible

Install dependencies (with python 3.8)

pip install -r requirements.txt

Benchmark

we use 9 worklaods with different input data sizes form Hibench The HiBench Benchmark Suite: Characterization of the MapReduce-Based Data Analysis

• WordCount (WC)
• TeraSort (TS)
• PageRank (PR)
• KMeans (KM)
• Gradient Boosted Trees(GBT)
• Nweight (NW)
• Principal Component Analysis (PCA)
• Aggregation (AGG)
• WordCount(for streaming)

Baseline

• Ottertune
• CDBTune
• Qtune

Datasets

1. The data collected based on the local 3-node Spark cluster includes the execution time of 4 spark workloads under different configuration values in the dataset, check dataset for more details.
2. For reinforcement learning training, memory pools consist of transitions(s,a,r,s') is in test_kit/ultimate/memory

Configuraiton details

1. Description of the performance-critical parameters From Spark, YARN and HDFS
2. For experiments on Flink, check test_kit/ultimate/flink-experimental/readme.md for more details.

Hardware environments

Seven experimental clusters to extensively evaluate the effectiveness of DeepCAT/DeepCAT+ and its robustness to various hardware environments.

Cluster	Nodes	Cluster types	BD frameworks	Evaluation
Cluster_A	3	Physical machines	Spark	Effectiveness
Cluster_B	3	VMs_1	Spark	Adaptability
Cluster_C	6	Physical machines	Flink	Other BD frameworks
Cluster_D	5	Physical machines + VMs_2	Spark	Heterogeneous clusters
Cluster_E	8	VMs_3	Spark	Large-scale clusters
Cluster_F	10	VMs_3	Spark	Large-scale clusters
Cluster_G	12	VMs_3	Spark	Large-scale clusters

• Physical machines: 8 cores, 16GB memory
• VMs_1: 8 cores, 8GB memory
• VMs_2: 12 cores, 8GB memory
• VMs_3: 8 cores, 16GB memory