BigDebug: Debugging Primitives for Interactive Big Data Processing in Spark

38th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2016), Austin, TX, May 14-22, 2016.

Muhammad Ali Gulzar, Matteo Interlandi, Seunghyun Yoo, Sai Deep Tetali, Tyson Condie, Todd Millstein, Miryung Kim

Developers use cloud computing platforms to process a large quantity of data in parallel when developing big data analytics. Debugging the massive parallel computations that run in today's datacenters is time consuming and error-prone. To address this challenge, we design a set of interactive, real-time debugging primitives for big data processing in Apache Spark, the next generation data-intensive scalable cloud computing platform. This requires re-thinking the notion of step-through debugging in a traditional debugger such as gdb, because pausing the entire computation across distributed worker nodes causes significant delay and naively inspecting millions of records using a watchpoint is too time consuming for an end user.

First, BigDebug's simulated breakpoints and on-demand watchpoints allow users to selectively examine distributed, intermediate data on the cloud with little overhead. Second, a user can also pinpoint a crash-inducing record and selectively resume relevant sub-computations after a quick fix. Third, a user can determine the root causes of errors (or delays) at the level of individual records through a fine-grained data provenance capability. Our evaluation shows that BigDebug scales to terabytes and its record-level tracing incurs less than 25% overhead on average. It determines crash culprits orders of magnitude more accurately and provides up to 100% time saving compared to the baseline replay debugger. The results show that BigDebug supports debugging at interactive speeds with minimal performance impact.

[PDF | Implementation]