Smart Resource Management for Data Streaming using an Online Bin-packing Strategy

Abstract: Data stream processing frameworks provide reliable and efficient mechanisms for executing complex workflows over large datasets. A common challenge for the majority of currently available streaming frameworks is efficient utilization of resources. Most frameworks use static or semi-static settings for resource utilization that work well for established use cases but lead to marginal improvements for unseen scenarios. Another pressing issue is the efficient processing of large individual objects such as images and matrices typical for scientific datasets. HarmonicIO has proven to be a good solution for streams of relatively large individual objects, as demonstrated in a benchmark comparison with the Spark and Kafka streaming frameworks. We here present an extension of the HarmonicIO framework based on the online bin-packing algorithm, to allow for efficient utilization of resources. Based on a real world use case from large-scale microscopy pipelines, we compare results of the new system to Spark's auto-scaling mechanism.