Optimizing Interactive Development of Data-Intensive Applications

Seventh ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SOCC 2016), Santa Clara, CA, October 5-7, 2016.
Matteo Interlandi, Sai Deep Tetali, Muhammad Ali Gulzar, Joseph Noor, Tyson Condie, Miryung Kim, Todd Millstein
Modern Data-Intensive Scalable Computing (DISC) systems are designed to process data through batch jobs that execute programs (e.g., queries) compiled from a high-level language. These programs are often developed interactively by posing ad-hoc queries over the base data until a desired result is generated. We observe that there can be significant overlap in the structure of these queries used to derive the final program. Yet, each successive execution of a slightly modified query is performed anew, which can significantly increase the development cycle. Vega is an Apache Spark framework that we have implemented for optimizing a series of similar Spark programs, likely originating from a development or exploratory data analysis session. Spark developers (e.g., data scientists) can leverage Vega to significantly reduce the amount of time it takes to re-execute a modified Spark program, reducing the overall time to market for their Big Data applications.

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