Energy-efficient hadoop for big data analytics and computing: A systematic review and research insights

Abstract

As the demands for big data analytics keep growing rapidly in scientific applications and online services, MapReduce and its open-source implementation Hadoop gained popularity in both academia and enterprises. Hadoop provides a highly feasible solution for building big data analytics platforms. However, defects of Hadoop are also exposed in many aspects including data management, resource management, scheduling policies, etc. These issues usually cause high energy consumption when running MapReduce jobs in Hadoop clusters. In this paper, we review the studies on improving energy efficiency of Hadoop clusters and summarize them in five categories including the energy-aware cluster node management, energy-aware data management, energy-aware resource allocation, energy-aware task scheduling and other energy-saving schemes. For each category, we briefly illustrate its rationale and comparatively analyze the relevant works regarding their advantages and limitations. Moreover, we present our insights and figure out possible research directions including energy-efficient cluster partitioning, data-oriented resource classification and provisioning, resource provisioning based on optimal utilization, EE and locality aware task scheduling, optimizing job profiling with machine learning, elastic power-saving Hadoop with containerization and efficient big data analytics on Hadoop. On one hand, the summary of studies on energy-efficient Hadoop presented in this paper provides useful guidance for the developers and users to better utilize Hadoop. On the other hand, the insights and research trends discussed in this work may inspire the relevant research on improving the energy efficiency of Hadoop in big data analytics.