Dot

Traditional parallel processing models, such as BSP, are "scale up" based, aiming to achieve high performance by increasing computing power, interconnection network bandwidth, and memory/storage capacity within dedicated systems, while big data analytics tasks aiming for high throughput demand that large distributed systems "scale out" by continuously adding computing and storage resources through networks. Each one of the "scale up" model and "scale out" model has a different set of performance requirements and system bottlenecks. In this paper, we develop a general model that abstracts critical computation and communication behavior and computation-communication interactions for big data analytics in a scalable and fault-tolerant manner. Our model is called DOT, represented by three matrices for data sets (D), concurrent data processing operations (O), and data transformations (T), respectively. With the DOT model, any big data analytics job execution in various software frameworks can be represented by a specific or non-specific number of elementary/composite DOT blocks, each of which performs operations on the data sets, stores intermediate results, makes necessary data transfers, and performs data transformations in the end. The DOT model achieves the goals of scalability and fault-tolerance by enforcing a data-dependency-free relationship among concurrent tasks. Under the DOT model, we provide a set of optimization guidelines, which are framework and implementation independent, and applicable to a wide variety of big data analytics jobs. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the DOT model through several case studies.