Understanding Big Data Analytic Workloads on Modern Processors

Big data analytics applications play a significant role in data centers, and hence it has become increasingly important to understand their behaviors in order to further improve the performance of data center computer systems, in which characterizing representative workloads is a key practical problem. In this paper, after investigating three most important application domains in terms of page views and daily visitors, we chose 11 representative data analytics workloads and characterized their micro-architectural behaviors by using hardware performance counters, so as to understand the impacts and implications of data analytics workloads on the systems equipped with modern superscalar out-of-order processors. Our study reveals that big data analytics applications themselves share many inherent characteristics, which place them in a different class from traditional workloads and scale-out services. To further understand the characteristics of big data analytics workloads we performed a correlation analysis of CPI (cycles per instruction) with other microarchitecture level characteristics and an investigation of the big data software stack impacts on application behaviors. Our correlation analysis showed that even though big data analytics workloads own notable pipeline front end stalls, the main factors affecting the CPI performance are long latency data accesses rather than the front end stalls. Our software stack investigation found that the typical big data software stack significantly contributes to the front end stalls and incurs bigger working set. Finally we gave several recommendations for architects, programmers and big data system designers with the knowledge acquired from this paper.