Spark-uDAPL: Cost-Saving Big Data Analytics on Microsoft Azure Cloud with RDMA Networks

Efficient Big Data analytics on Cloud Computing systems is still full of challenges. One of the biggest hurdles is the unsatisfactory performance offered by underlying virtualized I/O devices such as networks. To address this issue, the modern cloud resource providers (e.g., Microsoft Azure) have deployed high-performance networks, such as Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) capable networks in their clouds. However, in this paper, we find that by far, the RDMA networks on Microsoft Azure cannot support either IPoIB or native standard Verbs-based RDMA protocols. Instead, applications need to use the uDAPL (i.e., user Direct Access Programming Library) interface to enable RDMA communication on Azure Cloud, which makes impossible for modern Big Data stacks to leverage these high-performance networks as none of them can support the uDAPL interface yet. To address this issue, we first design an efficient uDAPL-based communication library with the best combinations of uDAPL communication operations. Then, we adapt the designed uDAPL library into the Hadoop RPC ping-pong message passing engine and the Spark Shuffle engine for bulk data transferring. Through our designs, we can improve the performance of Big Data analytics workloads with Hadoop RPC and Spark on RDMA-enabled Azure VMs by up to 90% and 82%, respectively, and save users’ cloud resource renting cost by 4.24x. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to design a uDAPL-based RDMA communication engine for Big Data analytics stacks (e.g., Spark).