Zero-Execution Retrieval-Augmented Configuration Tuning of Spark Applications

This repo experiments on various spark config tuning methods as presented in Zero-Execution Retrieval-Augmented Configuration Tuning of Spark Applications.

To start up a spark cluster, run:

cd docker/spark
docker-compose up

This will create a spark cluster with 2 workers with the master URL of spark://localhost:7077

If you have pyspark setup, you can run pyspark --master spark://localhost:7077 and start running spark queries on this cluster.docker exec -it tpch-spark35_tpch_1 bash

Build base images:

Run the following command to build all base images:

./docker/build.sh

To build specific base images, pass one of the following as a positional argument: spark3, spark3.5

./docker/build.sh spark3

Mount input data drive

If disk usage space is a concern on the current machine, we sugggest moving the data to a separate machine and mounting that machine. To avoid filling up disk space when running benchmarks on a local machine, we mount this remote drive to the local machine directly. Run the script sudo scripts/mount_storage.sh to mount the drive to /mnt/spark_tuning directory. Run the script sudo scripts/unmount_storage.sh to clean up the mount.

TPC-H

Go inside the tpc-h container:

docker exec -it tpch-spark35_tpch_1 bash

Inside the container, run the tpc-h benchmark:

./scripts/download_table_data.sh <password to download data> tpch <size {1g|10g|30g|100g|300g}>
export TPCH_INPUT_DATA_DIR="hdfs://spark-master:9000/data/<size>"
export TPCH_QUERY_OUTPUT_DIR="hdfs://spark-master:9000/results"
cd /tpch-spark
/opt/spark/bin/spark-submit\
    --master spark://spark-master:7077 --jars $SPARK_LISTENERS_JAR --conf spark.sql.queryExecutionListeners=$SPARK_QUERY_LISTENERS --conf spark.extraListeners=$SPARK_EXTRA_LISTENERS --class "main.scala.TpchQuery" target/scala-2.12/spark-tpc-h-queries_2.12-1.0.jar

TPC-DS

Go inside the tpc-ds container:

docker exec -it tpcds-spark35-tpcds-1 bash

Generate the data

cd ubin

There are multiple generation scripts, but I've found the third one works best.

./dsdgen3.sh --output-location ../data --scale-factor 1

Create HDFS directory and copy over the data

hdfs dfs -mkdir hdfs://spark-master:9000/tpcds_data
hdfs dfs -copyFromLocal ../data/* hdfs://spark-master:9000/tpcds_data

Run the Queries

All Queries

./run-tpcds.sh --data-location hdfs://spark-master:9000/tpcds_data \
               --master spark://spark-master:7077 \
               --conf spark.sql.queryExecutionListeners=$SPARK_QUERY_LISTENERS\
               --jars $SPARK_LISTENERS_JAR \
               --conf spark.extraListeners=$SPARK_EXTRA_LISTENERS  

Subset

./run-tpcds.sh --data-location hdfs://spark-master:9000/tpcds_data --query-filter "q2,q10" \
               --master spark://spark-master:7077 \
               --conf spark.sql.queryExecutionListeners=$SPARK_QUERY_LISTENERS\
               --jars $SPARK_LISTENERS_JAR \
               --conf spark.extraListeners=$SPARK_EXTRA_LISTENERS  

Range

 ./run-tpcds.sh --data-location hdfs://spark-master:9000/tpcds_data --query-filter "q11-27" 
               --master spark://spark-master:7077 \
               --conf spark.sql.queryExecutionListeners=$SPARK_QUERY_LISTENERS\
               --jars $SPARK_LISTENERS_JAR \
               --conf spark.extraListeners=$SPARK_EXTRA_LISTENERS  

You can view the results in tpcds-spark/output_result directory.

EMR

1. spin up 5 * r6g.2xlarge 1 master and 4 core nodes
2. disable dynamic allocation spark.dynamicAllocation.enabled
3. ssh -i ~/emr.pem hadoop@<ip>
4. Clone listener repo, tpch repo and tpcds repo along side tuning repo
5. Run emr_setup.sh
6. Run (cd ~/tpch-spark && exec ~/sbt/bin/sbt package) or (cd ~/tpcds-spark && exec ~/sbt/bin/sbt package)
7. ./scripts/download_table_data.sh spark2023 tpch 10g
8. go into spark-tuning and do pip install -r requirements.txt
9. go into the training directory and run the scripts you need to

Data

The raw data containing 19360 spark application executions with varying configuration parameters is publicly available at s3://l6lab/sparktune/raw. In it, you will find data_<tpch|tpcds>_<100g|250g|500g|750g>_<query>_emr_<trial_number> which contains the execution metrics, logical plans, and execution runtime of that specific run. There is also <tpch|tpcds>_<100g|250g|500g|750g>_<query>_emr.db which contains optuna trials data, indicating the spark configuration parameters that the trial was executed with.

Citing

If you use any part of this repository in your research, please cite the associated paper with the following bibtex entry:

Authors: Raunaq Suri, Ilan Gofman, Guangwei Yu, Jesse C. Cresswell

@article{suri2025zeroexecution,
  title={Zero-Execution Retrieval-Augmented Configuration Tuning of Spark Applications},
  author={Suri, Raunaq and Gofman, Ilan and Wei, Guangwei and Cresswell, Jesse C.},
  journal={arXiv:2503.03826},
  year={2025}
}

License

This data and code is licensed under the MIT License, copyright by Layer 6 AI.