Topology-aware resource allocation for data-intensive workloads

This paper proposes an architecture for optimized resource allocation in Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)-based cloud systems. Current IaaS systems are usually unaware of the hosted application's requirements and therefore allocate resources independently of its needs, which can significantly impact performance for distributed data-intensive applications. To address this resource allocation problem, we propose an architecture that adopts a "what if" methodology to guide allocation decisions taken by the IaaS. The architecture uses a prediction engine with a lightweight simulator to estimate the performance of a given resource allocation and a genetic algorithm to find an optimized solution in the large search space. We have built a prototype for Topology-Aware Resource Allocation (TARA) and evaluated it on a 80 server cluster with two representative MapReduce-based benchmarks. Our results show that TARA reduces the job completion time of these applications by up to 59% when compared to application-independent allocation policies.