Turbo: Efficient Communication Framework for Large-scale Data Processing Cluster

Big data processing clusters are suffering from a long job completion time due to the inefficient utilization of the RDMA capability. Our production measurement results in a large-scale cluster with hundreds of server nodes to process large-scale jobs have shown that the existing deployment of RDMA technique results in a long-tail job completion time, with some jobs even taking up more than twice the average time to complete. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of Turbo, an efficient communication framework for the large-scale data processing cluster to achieve high performance and scalability. The core of Turbo's approach is to leverage a dynamic block-level flowlet transmission mechanism and a non-blocking communication middleware to improve the network throughput and enhance system's scalability. Furthermore, Turbo ensures high system reliability by utilizing an external shuffle service as well as TCP serving as a backup. We integrate Turbo into Apache Spark and evaluate Turbo in a small-scale testbed and a large-scale cluster consisting of hundreds of server nodes. The small-scale testbed evaluation results show that Turbo improves the network throughput by 15.1% while maintaining high system reliability. The large-scale production results have shown Turbo can reduce the job completion time by 23.9% and increase the job completion rate by 2.03x over the existing RDMA solutions.