GraphOpt: a Framework for Automatic Parameters Tuning of Graph Processing Frameworks

Abstract

Finding the optimal configuration of a black-box system is a difficult problem that requires a lot of time and human labor. Big data processing frameworks are among the increasingly popular systems whose tuning is a complex and time consuming. The challenge of automatically finding the optimal parameters of big data frameworks attracted a lot of research in recent years. Some of the studies focused on optimizing specific frameworks such as distributed stream processing [1], [2], or finding the best cloud configurations [3], while others proposed general services for optimizing any black-box system [4]. In this paper, we introduce a new use case in the domain of automatic parameter tuning: optimizing the parameters of distributed graph processing frameworks. This task is notably difficult given the particular challenges of distributed graph processing that include the graph partitioning and the iterative nature of graph algorithms. To address this challenge, we designed and implemented GraphOpt: an efficient and scalable black-box optimization framework that automatically tunes distributed graph processing frameworks. GraphOpt implements state-of-the-art optimization algorithms and introduces a new hill-climbing-based search algorithm. These algorithms are used to optimize the performance of two major graph processing frameworks: Giraph and GraphX. Extensive experiments were run on GraphOpt using multiple graph benchmarks to evaluate its performance and show that it provides up to 47.8% improvement compared to random search and an average improvement of up to 5.7%.