Improving the Load Balance of MapReduce Operations based on the Key Distribution of Pairs

Load balance is important for MapReduce to reduce job duration, increase parallel efficiency, etc. Previous work focuses on coarse-grained scheduling. This study concerns fine-grained scheduling on MapReduce operations. Each operation represents one invocation of the Map or Reduce function. Scheduling MapReduce operations is difficult due to highly screwed operation loads, no support to collect workload statistics, and high complexity of the scheduling problem. So current implementations adopt simple strategies, leading to poor load balance. To address these difficulties, we design an algorithm to schedule operations based on the key distribution of intermediate pairs. The algorithm involves a sub-program for selecting operations for task slots, and we name it the Balanced Subset Sum (BSS) problem. We discuss properties of BSS and design exact and approximation algorithms for it. To transparently incorporate these algorithms into MapReduce, we design a communication mechanism to collect statistics, and a pipeline within Reduce tasks to increase resource utilization. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on scheduling MapReduce workload at this fine-grained level. Experiments on PUMA [T+12] benchmarks show consistent performance improvement. The job duration can be reduced by up to 37%, compared with standard MapReduce.