Architectural Impact on Performance of In-memoryData Analytics: Apache Spark Case Study

While cluster computing frameworks are contin-uously evolving to provide real-time data analysis capabilities,Apache Spark has managed to be at the forefront of big data an-alytics for being a unified framework for both, batch and streamdata processing. However, recent studies on micro-architecturalcharacterization of in-memory data analytics are limited to onlybatch processing workloads. We compare micro-architectural per-formance of batch processing and stream processing workloadsin Apache Spark using hardware performance counters on a dualsocket server. In our evaluation experiments, we have found thatbatch processing are stream processing workloads have similarmicro-architectural characteristics are bounded by the latency offrequent data access to DRAM. For data accesses we have foundthat simultaneous multi-threading is effective in hiding the datalatencies. We have also observed that (i) data locality on NUMAnodes can improve the performance by 10% on average and(ii)disabling next-line L1-D prefetchers can reduce the executiontime by up-to 14% and (iii) multiple small executors can provideup-to 36% speedup over single large executorQC 20160425