Selecting subexpressions to materialize at datacenter scale

We observe significant overlaps in the computations performed by user jobs in modern shared analytics clusters. Naively computing the same subexpressions multiple times results in wasting cluster resources and longer execution times. Given that these shared cluster workloads consist of tens of thousands of jobs, identifying overlapping computations across jobs is of great interest to both cluster operators and users. Nevertheless, existing approaches support orders of magnitude smaller workloads or employ heuristics with limited effectiveness. In this paper, we focus on the problem of subexpression selection for large workloads, i.e., selecting common parts of job plans and materializing them to speed-up the evaluation of subsequent jobs. We provide an ILP-based formulation of our problem and map it to a bipartite graph labeling problem. Then, we introduce BigSubs, a vertex-centric graph algorithm to iteratively choose in parallel which subexpressions to materialize and which subexpressions to use for evaluating each job. We provide a distributed implementation of our approach using our internal SQL-like execution framework, SCOPE, and assess its effectiveness over production workloads. BigSubs supports workloads with tens of thousands of jobs, yielding savings of up to 40% in machine-hours. We are currently integrating our techniques with the SCOPE runtime in our production clusters.