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The popularity of JSON as a data interchange format resulted in big amounts of datasets available for processing. Users would like to analyze this data using SQL queries but existing distributed systems limit their users to only two specific formats, JSONLine and GeoJSON. The complexity of JSON schema makes it challenging to parse arbitrary files in a modern distributed system while producing records with unified schema that can be processed with SQL. To address these challenges, this paper introduces dsJSON, a state-of-the-art distributed JSON processor that overcomes limitations in existing systems and scales to big and complex data. dsJSON introduces the projection tree, a novel data structure that applies selective parsing of nested attributes to produce records that are ready for SQL processors. The key objective of the projection tree is to parse a big JSON file in parallel to produce records with a unified schema that can be processed with SQL. dsJSON is integrated into SparkSQL which enables users to run arbitrary SQL queries on complex JSON files. It also pushes projection and filter down into the parser for full integration between the parser and the processor. Experiments on up-to two terabytes of real data show that dsJSON performs several times faster than existing systems. It can also efficiently parse extremely large files not supported by existing distributed parsers 

For compute-intensive iterative queries over a streaming graph, it is critical to evaluate the queries continuously and incrementally for best efficiency. However, the existing incremental graph processing requires a priori knowledge of the query (e.g., the source vertex of a vertex-specific query); otherwise, it has to fall back to the expensive full evaluation that starts from scratch. To alleviate this restriction, this work presents a principled solution to generalizing the incremental graph processing, such that queries, without their a priori knowledge, can also be evaluated incrementally. The solution centers around the concept of graph triangle inequalities, an idea inspired by the classical triangle inequality principle in the Euclidean space. Interestingly, similar principles can also be derived for many vertex-specific graph problems. These principles can help establish rigorous constraints between the evaluation of one graph query and the results of another, thus enabling reusing the latter to accelerate the former. Based on this finding, a novel streaming graph system, called Tripoline, is built which enables incremental evaluation of queries without their a priori knowledge. Built on top of a state-of-the-art shared-memory streaming graph engine (Aspen), Tripoline natively supports high-throughput low-cost graph updates. A systematic evaluation with a set of eight vertex-specific graph problems and four real-world large graphs confirms both the effectiveness of the proposed techniques and the efficiency of Tripoline. 

JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) and its variants have gained great popularity in recent years. Unfortunately, the performance of their analytics is often dragged down by the expensive JSON parsing. To address this, recent work has shown that building bitwise indices on JSON data, called structural indices , can greatly accelerate querying. Despite its promise, the existing structural index construction does not scale well as records become larger and more complex, due to its (inherently) sequential construction process and the involvement of costly memory copies that grow as the nesting level increases. To address the above issues, this work introduces Pison - a more memory-efficient structural index constructor with supports of intra-record parallelism. First, Pison features a redesign of the bottleneck step in the existing solution. The new design is not only simpler but more memory-efficient. More importantly, Pison is able to build structural indices for a single bulky record in parallel, enabled by a group of customized parallelization techniques. Finally, Pison is also optimized for better data locality, which is especially critical in the scenario of bulky record processing. Our evaluation using real-world JSON datasets shows that Pison achieves 9.8X speedup (on average) over the existing structural index construction solution for bulky records and 4.6X speedup (on average) of end-to-end performance (indexing plus querying) over a state-of-the-art SIMD-based JSON parser on a 16-core machine. 

Finite-state machine (FSM) is a fundamental computation model used by many applications. However, FSM execution is known to be “embarrassingly sequential” due to the state dependences among transitions. Existing solutions leverage enumerative or speculative parallelization to break the dependences. However, the efficiency of both parallelization schemes highly depends on the properties of the FSM and its inputs. For those exhibiting unfavorable properties, the former suffers from the overhead of maintaining multiple execution paths, while the latter is bottlenecked by the serial reprocessing among the misspeculation cases. Either way, the FSM parallelization scalability is seriously compromised. This work addresses the above scalability challenges with two novel techniques. First, for enumerative parallelization, it proposes path fusion. Inspired by the classic NFA to DFA conversion, it maps a vector of states in the original FSM to a new (fused) state. In this way, path fusion can reduce multiple FSM execution paths into a single path, minimizing the overhead of path maintenance. Second, for speculative parallelization, this work introduces higher-order speculation to avoid the serial reprocessing during validations. This is a generalized speculation model that allows speculated states to be validated speculatively. Finally, this work integrates different schemes of FSM parallelization into a framework—BoostFSM, which automatically selects the best based on the relevant properties of the FSM. Evaluation using real-world FSMs with diverse characteristics shows that BoostFSM can raise the average speedup from 3.1× and 15.4× of the existing speculative and enumerative parallelization schemes, respectively, to 25.8× on a 64-core machine. 

Simultaneous evaluating a batch of iterative graph queries on a distributed system enables amortization of high communication and computation costs across multiple queries. As demonstrated by our prior work on MultiLyra [BigData'19], batched graph query processing can deliver significant speedups and scale up to batch sizes of hundreds of queries.In this paper, we greatly expand the applicable scenarios for batching by developing BEAD, a system that supports Batching in the presence of Evolving Analytics Demands. First, BEAD allows the graph data set to evolve (grow) over time, more vertices (e.g., users) and edges (e.g., interactions) are added. In addition, as the graph data set evolves, BEAD also allows the user to add more queries of interests to the query batch to accommodate new user demands. The key to the superior efficiency offered by BEAD lies in a series of incremental evaluation techniques that leverage the results of prior request to "fast-foward" the evaluation of the current request.We performed experiments comparing batching in BEAD with batching in MultiLyra for multiple input graphs and algorithms. Experiments demonstrate that BEAD's batched evaluation of 256 queries, following graph changes that add up to 100K edges to a billion edge Twitter graph and also query changes of up to 32 new queries, outperforms MultiLyra's batched evaluation by factors of up to 26.16 × and 5.66 × respectively.