A3-Storm: topology-, traffic-, and resource-aware storm scheduler for heterogeneous clusters

Like other emerging fields, Stream Processing Engines (SPEs) pose several challenges to the researchers such as resource awareness, dynamic configurations, heterogeneous clusters, and load balancing. All of these aspects play a major role in the job scheduling process. Inefficiency in any of them causes problems for achieving the maximum throughput. SPEs must contemplate other aspects like resource provisioning, job’s computation requirement, physical distance between communicating nodes, etc. Currently, SPEs ignore topology’s structure as well as inter-executor traffic while scheduling. Due to this, frequently communicating tasks may end up at different computing nodes which increases network latency. In this paper, A3-Storm, a scheduler, based on topology and traffic is proposed that optimizes resource usage for heterogeneous clusters. The aim is to improve efficiency using resource-aware task assignments that results in enhanced throughput and resource utilization. A3-Storm schedules topology using inter-executor traffic and supervisor node’s computing power. A3-Storm is divided into two phases: in the first phase, executors are logically grouped to minimize inter-group communication traffic according to the topology structure or inter-executor traffic. In the second phase, these groups are assigned to physical nodes starting from the most powerful node. Apache Storm (a popular open-source SPE) is used for the implementation of A3-Storm. Results are generated with the help of 2 benchmark topologies, and results are compared with 3 state-of-the-art algorithms. Extensive experiment results show up to 25% and 12% improvement in throughput as compared to the default Storm scheduler and resource-aware scheduler, respectively, with a significant amount of resource savings through consolidation.