Abstract
MapReduce is a design pattern for processing large datasets distributed on a cluster. Its performances are linked to the data structure and the runtime environment. Indeed, data skew can yield an unfair task allocation, but even when the initial allocation produced by the partition function is well balanced, an unfair allocation can occur during the reduce phase due to the heterogeneous performance of nodes. For these reasons, we propose an adaptive multi-agent system. In our approach, the reducer agents interact during the job and the task reallocation is based on negotiation in order to decrease the workload of the most loaded reducer and so the runtime. In this paper, we propose and evaluate two negotiation strategies. Finally, we experiment our multi-agent system with real-world datasets over heterogeneous runtime environment.
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This paper is an extension of (Baert et al. [1]). We provide here a deeper description of the framework including some illustrative examples. Finally, we present/evaluate some additional strategies and experiments measuring the speedup of our MAS in a distributed environment.
It is worth noticing that the task delegation is conservative.
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Acknowledgements
This project is supported by the CNRS Challenge Mastodons. The authors would like to thank the scientific committee of the International Conference on Practical Applications on Multi-agent Systems for the invitation in this special issue and the reviewers for their useful suggestions.
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Baert, Q., Caron, AC., Morge, M. et al. Fair multi-agent task allocation for large datasets analysis. Knowl Inf Syst 54, 591–615 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-017-1087-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-017-1087-4