Performance Prediction for Data-driven Workflows on Apache Spark

Spark is an in-memory framework for implementing distributed applications of various types. Predicting the execution time of Spark applications is an important but challenging problem that has been tackled in the past few years by several studies; most of them achieving good prediction accuracy on simple applications (e.g. known ML algorithms or SQL-based applications). In this work, we consider complex data-driven workflow applications, in which the execution and data flow can be modeled by Directly Acyclic Graphs (DAGs). Workflows can be made of an arbitrary combination of known tasks, each applying a set of Spark operations to their input data. By adopting a hybrid approach, combining analytical and machine learning (ML) models, trained on small DAGs, we can predict, with good accuracy, the execution time of unseen workflows of higher complexity and size. We validate our approach through an extensive experimentation on real-world complex applications, comparing different ML models and choices of feature sets.