SparkBench: a spark benchmarking suite characterizing large-scale in-memory data analytics

Abstract

Spark has been increasingly employed by industries for big data analytics recently, due to its resilience, scalability and efficient in-memory distributed programming model. Meanwhile, the rapid growing community is also actively incubating a rich ecosystem around Spark to tackle various big data challenges. The current benchmarks fall short in providing guidance of development, optimization, configuration and deployment of Spark. To this end, we introduce SparkBench, a Spark specific benchmarking suite. It selectively embraces a set of representative applications to identify various performance bottlenecks and reveals the resource consumption behaviors across execution phases. Overall, SparkBench covers four critical usage patterns of Spark, including machine learning, graph processing, stream computations and SQL query processing. We present comprehensive characterization of resource consumptions, data flows and timing information under different execution patterns and demonstrate that SparkBench can effectively guide the optimization of data analytic platforms to better suit for various workloads.