Canary: A Scheduling Architecture for High Performance Cloud Computing

We present Canary, a scheduling architecture that allows high performance analytics workloads to scale out to run on thousands of cores. Canary is motivated by the observation that a central scheduler is a bottleneck for high performance codes: a handful of multicore workers can execute tasks faster than a controller can schedule them. The key insight in Canary is to reverse the responsibilities between controllers and workers. Rather than dispatch tasks to workers, which then fetch data as necessary, in Canary the controller assigns data partitions to workers, which then spawn and schedule tasks locally. We evaluate three benchmark applications in Canary on up to 64 servers and 1,152 cores on Amazon EC2. Canary achieves up to 9-90× speedup over Spark and up to 4× speedup over GraphX, a highly optimized graph analytics engine. While current centralized schedulers can schedule 2,500 tasks/second, each Canary worker can schedule 136,000 tasks/second per core and experiments show this scales out linearly, with 64 workers scheduling over 120 million tasks per second, allowing Canary to support optimized jobs running on thousands of cores.