CASPR: Connectivity-Aware Scheduling for Partition Resilience

We present a comprehensive empirical study of the impact partial network partitions have on cluster managers in data analysis frameworks. Our study shows that modern scheduling approaches are vulnerable to partial network partitions. Partial partitions can lead to a complete cluster pause or a significant loss of performance. To overcome the shortcomings of the state-of-the-art schedulers, we design CASPR, a connectivity-aware scheduler. CASPR incorporates the current network connectivity information when making scheduling decisions to allocate fully connected nodes for a given application. CASPR effectively hides partial partitions from applications. Our evaluation of a CASPR prototype shows that it can tolerate partial network partitions, as well as eliminate application halting or significant loss of performance.