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Apache Spark arguably is the most prominent Big Data processing framework tackling the scalability challenge of a wide variety of modern workloads. A key to its success is caching critical data in memory, thereby eliminating wasteful computations of regenerating intermediate results. While critical to performance, caching is not automated. Instead, developers have to manually handle such a data management task via APIs, a process that is error-prone and labor-intensive, yet may still yield sub-optimal performance due to execution complexities. Existing optimizations rely on expensive profiling steps and/or application-specific cost models to enable a postmortem analysis and a manual modification to existing applications. This paper presents CACHEIT, built to take the guesswork off the users while running applications as-is. CACHEIT analyzes the program’s workflow, extracting important features such as dependencies and access patterns, using them as an oracle to detect high-value data candidates and guide the caching decisions at run time. CACHEIT liberates users from low-level memory management requirements, allowing them to focus on the business logic instead. CACHEIT is application-agnostic and requires no profiling or a cost model. A thorough evaluation with a broad range of Spark applications on real-world datasets shows that CACHEIT is effective in maintaining satisfactory performance, incurring only marginal slowdown compared to the manually well-tuned counterparts 

Thanks to recent advances in high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnects, running a data-intensive application with a remote memory pool is now a feasibility. When developing a data-intensive application, a managed language such as Java is often the developer’s choice due to convenience of the runtime such as automatic memory management. However, the memory management cost increases significantly in far memory due to remote memory accesses. Our insight is that data hotness (i.e., access frequency of objects) is the key to reducing the memory management cost and improving efficiency in far memory. In this paper, we present an ongoing work designing Polar, an enhanced runtime system that is hotness-aware, and optimized for far memory. In Polar, the garbage collector is augmented to identify cold (infrequently accessed) objects and relocate them to remote memory pools. By placing objects at memory locations based on their access frequency, Polar minimizes the number of remote accesses, ensures low access latency for the application, and thus improves overall performance.