Hadoop MapReduce Performance on SSDs for Analyzing Social Networks

The advent of Solid State Drives (SSDs) stimulated a lot of research to investigate and exploit to the extent possible the potentials of the new drive. The focus of this work is on the investigation of the relative performance and benefits of SSDs versus hard disk drives (HDDs) when they are used as underlying storage for Hadoop's MapReduce. In particular, we depart from all earlier relevant works in that we do not use their workloads, but examine MapReduce tasks and data suitable for performing analysis of complex networks which present different execution patterns. Despite the plethora of algorithms and implementations for complex network analysis, we carefully selected our “benchmarking methods” so that they include methods that perform both local and network-wide operations in a complex network, and also they are generic enough in the sense that they can be used as primitives for more sophisticated network processing applications. We evaluated the performance of SSDs and HDDs by executing these algorithms on real social network data and excluding the effects of network bandwidth which can severely bias the results. The obtained results confirmed in part earlier studies which showed that SSDs are beneficial to Hadoop. However, we also provided solid evidence that the processing pattern of the running application has a significant role, and thus future studies must not blindly add SSDs to Hadoop, but they should build components for assessing the type of processing pattern of the application and then direct the data to the appropriate storage medium.