Performance and energy evaluation of spark applications on low-power SoCs

Microservers have recently gained attention as low-cost, low power, reduced footprint servers that are mainly based on energy efficient processors such as the ones used in embedded systems. Microservers based on low-power embedded processors are mainly targeting lightweight applications or parallel applications that benefit most from individual low-power servers with sufficient I/O between nodes rather than high performance processors. In this paper we evaluate the mapping of Apache Spark on low-power SoC-based processors. Apache Spark is one of the most widely framework in cloud computing for batch and streaming data analytics. We evaluate the energy efficiency of low-power SoCs that are used in embedded system for the execution of several Spark applications. The performance evaluation shows that low-power SoCs have the potential to offer up to 3x higher energy efficiency compared to high performance processors typically used in data centers.