Paper Info
Title
Approximate Stream Analytics in Apache Flink and Apache Spark Streaming.
Abstract
Approximate computing aims for efficient execution of workflows where an approximate output is sufficient instead of the exact output. The idea behind approximate computing is to compute over a representative sample instead of the entire input dataset. Thus, approximate computing - based on the chosen sample size - can make a systematic trade-off between the output accuracy and computation efficiency. Unfortunately, the state-of-the-art systems for approximate computing primarily target batch analytics, where the input data remains unchanged during the course of sampling. Thus, they are not well-suited for stream analytics. This motivated the design of StreamApprox - a stream analytics system for approximate computing. To realize this idea, we designed an online stratified reservoir sampling algorithm to produce approximate output with rigorous error bounds. Importantly, our proposed algorithm is generic and can be applied to two prominent types of stream processing systems: (1) batched stream processing such as Apache Spark Streaming, and (2) pipelined stream processing such as Apache Flink. We evaluated StreamApprox using a set of microbenchmarks and real-world case studies. Our results show that Spark- and Flink-based StreamApprox systems achieve a speedup of $1.15times$-$3times$ compared to the respective native Spark Streaming and Flink executions, with varying sampling fraction of $80%$ to $10%$. Furthermore, we have also implemented an improved baseline in addition to the native execution baseline - a Spark-based approximate computing system leveraging the existing sampling modules in Apache Spark. Compared to the improved baseline, our results show that StreamApprox achieves a speedup $1.1times$-$2.4times$ while maintaining the same accuracy level.
Year
Venue
Field
2017
arXiv: Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Spark (mathematics),Computer science,Reservoir sampling,Real-time computing,Computational science,Sampling (statistics),Stream processing,Analytics,Operating system,Sampling fraction,Speedup,Computation
DocType
Volume
Citations 
Journal
abs/1709.02946
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Le Quoc, D.1558.21
Ruichuan Chen220518.95
Pramod Bhatotia341428.94
Christof Fetzer42429172.89
Volker Hilt548041.90
Thorsten Strufe684680.61