Managed languages such as Java and Scala are prevalently used in development of large-scale distributed systems. Under the managed runtime, when performing data transfer across machines, a task frequently conducted in a Big Data system, the system needs to serialize a sea of objects into a byte sequence before sending them over the network. The remote node receiving the bytes then deserializes them back into objects. This process is both performance-inefficient and labor-intensive: (1) object serialization/deserialization makes heavy use of reflection, an expensive runtime operation and/or (2) serialization/deserialization functions need to be hand-written and are error-prone. This paper presents Skyway, a JVM-based technique that can directly connect managed heaps of different (local or remote) JVM processes. Under Skyway, objects in the source heap can be directly written into a remote heap without changing their formats. Skyway provides performance benefits to any JVM-based system by completely eliminating the need (1) of invoking serialization/deserialization functions, thus saving CPU time, and (2) of requiring developers to hand-write serialization functions.
Gerenuk: thin computation over big native data using speculative program transformation
Big Data systems are typically implemented in object-oriented languages such as Java and Scala due to the quick development cycle they provide. These systems are executed on top of a managed runtime such as the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), which requires each data item to be represented as an object before it can be processed. This representation is the direct cause of many kinds of severe inefficiencies.
We developed Gerenuk, a compiler and runtime that aims to enable a JVM-based data-parallel system to achieve near-native efficiency by transforming a set of statements in the system for direct execution over inlined native bytes. The key insight leading to Gerenuk's success is two-fold: (1) analytics workloads often use immutable and confined data types. If we speculatively optimize the system and user code with this assumption, the transformation can be made tractable. (2) The flow of data starts at a deserialization point where objects are created from a sequence of native bytes and ends at a serialization point where they are turned back into a byte sequence to be sent to the disk or network. This flow naturally defines a speculative execution region (SER) to be transformed. Gerenuk compiles a SER speculatively into a more »
- Publication Date:
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10173705
- Journal Name:
- SOSP '19: Proceedings of the 27th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles
- Page Range or eLocation-ID:
- 538 to 553
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Publisher's Version of Record
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3341301.3359643
