Identifying the potential of Near Data Computing for Apache Spark

Abstract: While cluster computing frameworks are continuously evolving to provide real-time data analysis capabilities, Apache Spark has managed to be at the forefront of big data analytics for being a unified framework for both, batch and stream data processing. There is also a renewed interest is Near Data Computing (NDC) due to technological advancement in the last decade. However, it is not known if NDC architectures can improve the performance of big data processing frameworks such as Apache Spark. In this position paper, we hypothesize in favour of NDC architecture comprising programmable logic based hybrid 2D integrated processing-in-memory and in-storage processing for Apache Spark, by extensive profiling of Apache Spark based workloads on Ivy Bridge Server.