HeteroSpark: A heterogeneous CPU/GPU Spark platform for machine learning algorithms

Analytics algorithms on big data sets require tremendous computational capabilities. Spark is a recent development that addresses big data challenges with data and computation distribution and in-memory caching. However, as a CPU only framework, Spark cannot leverage GPUs and a growing set of GPU libraries to achieve better performance and energy efficiency. We present HeteroSpark, a GPU-accelerated heterogeneous architecture integrated with Spark, which combines the massive compute power of GPUs and scalability of CPUs and system memory resources for applications that are both data and compute intensive. We make the following contributions in this work: (1) we integrate the GPU accelerator into current Spark framework to further leverage data parallelism and achieve algorithm acceleration; (2) we provide a plug-n-play design by augmenting Spark platform so that current Spark applications can choose to enable/disable GPU acceleration; (3) application acceleration is transparent to developers, therefore existing Spark applications can be easily ported to this heterogeneous platform without code modifications. The evaluation of HeteroSpark demonstrates up to 18× speedup on a number of machine learning applications.