Optimisation of a hadoop cluster based on SDN in cloud computing for big data applications

Abstract

Big data has received a great deal attention from many sectors, including academia, industry and government. The Hadoop framework has emerged for supporting its storage and analysis using the MapReduce programming module. However, this framework is a complex system that has more than 150 parameters and some of them can exert a considerable effect on the performance of a Hadoop job. The optimum tuning of the Hadoop parameters is a difficult task as well as being time consuming. In this thesis, an optimisation approach is presented to improve the performance of a Hadoop framework by setting the values of the Hadoop parameters automatically. Specifically, genetic programming is used to construct a fitness function that represents the interrelations among the Hadoop parameters. Then, a genetic algorithm is employed to search for the optimum or near the optimum values of the Hadoop parameters. A Hadoop cluster is configured on two severe at Brunel University London to evaluate the performance of the proposed optimisation approach. The experimental results show that the performance of a Hadoop MapReduce job for 20 GB on Word Count Application is improved by 69.63% and 30.31% when compared to the default settings and state of the art, respectively. Whilst on Tera sort application, it is improved by 73.39% and 55.93%. For better optimisation, SDN is also employed to improve the performance of a Hadoop job. The experimental results show that the performance of a Hadoop job in SDN network for 50 GB is improved by 32.8% when compared to traditional network. Whilst on Tera sort application, the improvement for 50 GB is on average 38.7%. An effective computing platform is also presented in this thesis to support solar irradiation data analytics. It is built based on RHIPE to provide fast analysis and calculation for solar irradiation datasets. The performance of RHIPE is compared with the R language in terms of accuracy, scalability and speedup. The speed up of RHIPE is evaluated by Gustafson's Law, which is revised to enhance the performance of the parallel computation on intensive irradiation data sets in a cluster computing environment like Hadoop. The performance of the proposed work is evaluated using a Hadoop cluster based on the Microsoft azure cloud and the experimental results show that RHIPE provides considerable improvements over the R language. Finally, an effective routing algorithm based on SDN to improve the performance of a Hadoop job in a large scale cluster in a data centre network is presented. The proposed algorithm is used to improve the performance of a Hadoop job during the shuffle phase by allocating efficient paths for each shuffling flow, according to the network resources demand of each flow as well as their size and number. Furthermore, it is also employed to allocate alternative paths for each shuffling flow in the case of any link crashing or failure. This algorithm is evaluated by two network topologies, namely, fat tree and leaf-spine, built by EstiNet emulator software. The experimental results show that the proposed approach improves the performance of a Hadoop job in a data centre network.