Machine-Learning Based Memory Prediction Model for Data Parallel Workloads in Apache Spark

Abstract

A lack of memory can lead to job failures or increase processing times for garbage collection. However, if too much memory is provided, the processing time is only marginally reduced, and most of the memory is wasted. Many big data processing tasks are executed in cloud environments. When renting virtual resources in a cloud environment, it is necessary to pay the cost according to the specifications of resources (i.e., the number of virtual cores and the size of memory), as well as rental time. In this paper, given the type of workload and volume of the input data, we analyze the memory usage pattern and derive the efficient memory size of data-parallel workloads in Apache Spark. Then, we propose a machine-learning-based prediction model that determines the efficient memory for a given workload and data. To determine the validity of the proposed model, we applied it to data-parallel workloads which include a deep learning model. The predicted memory values were in close agreement with the actual amount of required memory. Additionally, the whole building time for the proposed model requires a maximum of 44% of the total execution time of a data-parallel workload. The proposed model can improve memory efficiency up to 1.89 times compared with the vanilla Spark setting.