Sol: Fast Distributed Computation Over Slow Networks

Authors: 

Fan Lai, Jie You, Xiangfeng Zhu, Harsha V. Madhyastha, and Mosharaf Chowdhury, University of Michigan

Abstract: 

The popularity of big data and AI has led to many optimizations at different layers of distributed computation stacks. Despite – or perhaps, because of – its role as the narrow waist of such software stacks, the design of the execution engine, which is in charge of executing every single task of a job, has mostly remained unchanged. As a result, the execution engines available today are ones primarily designed for low latency and high bandwidth datacenter networks. When either or both of the network assumptions do not hold, CPUs are significantly underutilized.

In this paper, we take a first-principles approach toward developing an execution engine that can adapt to diverse network conditions. Sol, our federated execution engine architecture, flips the status quo in two respects. First, to mitigate the impact of high latency, Sol proactively assigns tasks, but does so judiciously to be resilient to uncertainties. Second, to improve the overall resource utilization, Sol decouples communication from computation internally instead of committing resources to both aspects of a task simultaneously. Our evaluations on EC2 show that, compared to Apache Spark in resource-constrained networks, Sol improves SQL and machine learning jobs by 16.4× and 4.2× on average.

NSDI '20 Open Access Sponsored by NetApp

Open Access Media

USENIX is committed to Open Access to the research presented at our events. Papers and proceedings are freely available to everyone once the event begins. Any video, audio, and/or slides that are posted after the event are also free and open to everyone. Support USENIX and our commitment to Open Access.

BibTeX
@inproceedings {246320,
author = {Fan Lai and Jie You and Xiangfeng Zhu and Harsha V. Madhyastha and Mosharaf Chowdhury},
title = {Sol: Fast Distributed Computation Over Slow Networks },
booktitle = {17th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 20)},
year = {2020},
isbn = {978-1-939133-13-7},
address = {Santa Clara, CA},
pages = {273--288},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi20/presentation/lai},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = feb
}

Presentation Video