Energy efficiency for large-scale MapReduce workloads with significant interactive analysis

MapReduce workloads have evolved to include increasing amounts of time-sensitive, interactive data analysis; we refer to such workloads as MapReduce with Interactive Analysis (MIA). Such workloads run on large clusters, whose size and cost make energy efficiency a critical concern. Prior works on MapReduce energy efficiency have not yet considered this workload class. Increasing hardware utilization helps improve efficiency, but is challenging to achieve for MIA workloads. These concerns lead us to develop BEEMR (Berkeley Energy Efficient MapReduce), an energy efficient MapReduce workload manager motivated by empirical analysis of real-life MIA traces at Facebook. The key insight is that although MIA clusters host huge data volumes, the interactive jobs operate on a small fraction of the data, and thus can be served by a small pool of dedicated machines; the less time-sensitive jobs can run on the rest of the cluster in a batch fashion. BEEMR achieves 40-50% energy savings under tight design constraints, and represents a first step towards improving energy efficiency for an increasingly important class of datacenter workloads.