Benchmarking Resource Usage of Underlying Datatypes of Apache Spark

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine how resource usage of an analytic is affected by the different underlying datatypes of Spark analytics - Resilient Distributed Datasets (RDDs), Datasets, and DataFrames. The resource usage of an analytic is explored as a viable, and preferred alternative of benchmarking big data analytics instead of the current common benchmarking performed using execution time. The run time of an analytic is shown to not be guaranteed to be a reproducible metric since many external factors to the job can affect the execution time. Instead, metrics readily available through Spark including peak execution memory are used to benchmark the resource usage of these different datatypes in common applications of Spark analytics, such as counting, caching, repartitioning, and KMeans.