Incremental Parallel and Distributed Systems

Abstract

Incremental computation strives for efficient successive runs of applications by reexecuting only those parts of the computation that are affected by a given input change instead of recomputing everything from scratch. To realize the benefits of incremental computation, researchers and practitioners are developing new systems where the application programmer can provide an efficient update mechanism for changing application data. Unfortunately, most of the existing solutions are limiting because they not only depart from existing programming models, but also require programmers to devise an incremental update mechanism (or a dynamic algorithm) on a per-application basis. In this thesis, we present incremental parallel and distributed systems that enable existing real-world applications to automatically benefit from efficient incremental updates. Our approach neither requires departure from current models of programming, nor the design and implementation of dynamic algorithms. To achieve these goals, we have designed and built the following incremental systems: (i) Incoop — a system for incremental MapReduce computation; (ii) Shredder — a GPU-accelerated system for incremental storage; (iii) Slider — a stream processing platform for incremental slidingwindow analytics; and (iv) iThreads — a threading library for parallel incremental computation. Our experience with these systems shows that significant performance can be achieved for existing applications without requiring any additional effort from programmers.