A Study of Effective Replica Reconstruction Schemes for the Hadoop Distributed File System

Abstract

Distributed file systems, which manage large amounts of data over multiple commercially available machines, have attracted attention as management and processing systems for Big Data applications. A distributed file system consists of multiple data nodes and provides reliability and availability by holding multiple replicas of data. Due to system failure or maintenance, a data node may be removed from the system, and the data blocks held by the removed data node are lost. If data blocks are missing, the access load of the other data nodes that hold the lost data blocks increases, and as a result, the performance of data processing over the distributed file system decreases. Therefore, replica reconstruction is an important issue to reallocate the missing data blocks to prevent such performance degradation. The Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) is a widely used distributed file system. In the HDFS replica reconstruction process, source and destination data nodes for replication are selected randomly. We find that this replica reconstruction scheme is inefficient because data transfer is biased. Therefore, we propose two more effective replica reconstruction schemes that aim to balance the workloads of replication processes. Our proposed replication scheduling strategy assumes that nodes are arranged in a ring, and data blocks are transferred based on this one-directional ring structure to minimize the difference in the amount of transfer data for each node. Based on this strategy, we propose two replica reconstruction schemes: an optimization scheme and a heuristic scheme. We have implemented the proposed schemes in HDFS and evaluate them on an actual HDFS cluster. We also conduct experiments on a large-scale environment by simulation. From the experiments in the actual environment, we confirm that the replica reconstruction throughputs of the proposed schemes show a 45% improvement compared to the HDFS default scheme. We also verify that the heuristic scheme is effective because it shows performance comparable to the optimization scheme. Furthermore, the experimental results on the large-scale simulation environment show that while the optimization scheme is unrealistic because a long time is required to find the optimal solution, the heuristic scheme is very efficient because it can be scalable, and that scheme improved replica reconstruction throughput by up to 25% compared to the default scheme.