Publications

Plumb: Efficient stream processing of multi‐user pipelines

Abstract

Operational services run 247 and require analytics pipelines to evaluate performance. In mature services such as domain name system (DNS), these pipelines often grow to many stages developed by multiple, loosely coupled teams. Such pipelines pose two problems: first, computation and data storage may be duplicated across components developed by different groups, wasting resources. Second, processing can be skewed, with structural skew occurring when different pipeline stages need different amounts of resources, and computational skew occurring when a block of input data requires increased resources. Duplication and structural skew both decrease efficiency, increasing cost, latency, or both. Computational skew can cause pipeline failure or deadlock when resource consumption balloons; we have seen cases where pessimal traffic increases CPU requirements 6‐fold. Detecting duplication is …

Date
2021
Authors
Abdul Qadeer, John Heidemann
Journal
Software: Practice and Experience
Volume
51
Issue
2
Pages
385-408