Data Placement and Replica Selection for Improving Co-location in Distributed Environments

Increasing need for large-scale data analytics in a number of application domains has led to a dramatic rise in the number of distributed data management systems, both parallel relational databases, and systems that support alternative frameworks like MapReduce. There is thus an increasing contention on scarce data center resources like network bandwidth; further, the energy requirements for powering the computing equipment are also growing dramatically. As we show empirically, increasing the execution parallelism by spreading out data across a large number of machines may achieve the intended goal of decreasing query latencies, but in most cases, may increase the total resource and energy consumption significantly. For many analytical workloads, however, minimizing query latencies is often not critical; in such scenarios, we argue that we should instead focus on minimizing the average query span, i.e., the average number of machines that are involved in processing of a query, through colocation of data items that are frequently accessed together. In this work, we exploit the fact that most distributed environments need to use replication for fault tolerance, and we devise workload-driven replica selection and placement algorithms that attempt to minimize the average query span. We model a historical query workload trace as a hypergraph over a set of data items, and formulate and analyze the problem of replica placement by drawing connections to several well-studied graph theoretic concepts. We develop a series of algorithms to decide which data items to replicate, and where to place the replicas. We show effectiveness of our proposed approach by presenting results on a collection of synthetic and real workloads. Our experiments show that careful data placement and replication can dramatically reduce the average query spans resulting in significant reductions in the resource consumption.