Learning-Based Dynamic Memory Allocation Schemes for Apache Spark Data Processing

Apache Spark is an in-memory analytic framework that has been adopted in the industry and research fields. Two memory managers, Static and Unified, are available in Spark to allocate memory for caching Resilient Distributed Datasets (RDDs) and executing tasks. However, we find that the static memory manager (SMM) lacks flexibility, while the unified memory manager (UMM) puts heavy pressure on the garbage collection of the JVM on which Spark resides. To address these issues, we design a learning-based bidirectional usage-bounded memory allocation scheme to support dynamic memory allocation with the consideration of both memory demands and latency introduced by garbage collection. We first develop an auto-tuning memory manager (ATuMm) that adopts an intuitive feedback-based learning solution. However, ATuMm is a slow learner that can only alter the states of Java Virtual Memory (JVM) Heap in a limited range. That is, ATuMm decides to increase or decrease the boundary between the execution and storage memory pools by a fixed portion of JVM Heap size. To overcome this shortcoming, we further develop a new reinforcement learning-based memory manager (Q-ATuMm) that uses a Q-learning intelligent agent to dynamically learn and tune the partition of JVM Heap. We implement our new memory managers in Spark 2.4.0 and evaluate them by conducting experiments in a real Spark cluster. Our experimental results show that our memory manager can reduce the total garbage collection time and thus further improve Spark applications’ performance (i.e., reduced latency) compared to the existing Spark memory management solutions. By integrating our machine learning-driven memory manager into Spark, we can further obtain around 1.3x times reduction in the latency.