Fine-grained modeling and optimization for intelligent resource management in big data processing

Big data processing at the production scale presents a highly complex environment for resource optimization (RO), a problem crucial for meeting performance goals and budgetary constraints of analytical users. The RO problem is challenging because it involves a set of decisions (the partition count, placement of parallel instances on machines, and resource allocation to each instance), requires multi-objective optimization (MOO), and is compounded by the scale and complexity of big data systems while having to meet stringent time constraints for scheduling. This paper presents a MaxCompute based integrated system to support multi-objective resource optimization via fine-grained instance-level modeling and optimization. We propose a new architecture that breaks RO into a series of simpler problems, new fine-grained predictive models, and novel optimization methods that exploit these models to make effective instance-level RO decisions well under a second. Evaluation using production workloads shows that our new RO system could reduce 37--72% latency and 43--78% cost at the same time, compared to the current optimizer and scheduler, while running in 0.02-0.23s.