How to understand the progress bar for take() in spark-shell - shell

I called take() method of an RDD[LabeledPoint] from spark-shell, which seemed to be a laborious job for spark.
The spark-shell shows a progress-bar:
The progress-bar fills again and again and I don't know how to produce a reasonable estimate of the needed time (or total-progress ) from those numbers above.
Does anyone know what those numbers mean ?
Thanks in advance.

The numbers show the Spark stage that is running, the number of completed, in-progress, and total tasks in the stage. (See
What do the numbers on the progress bar mean in spark-shell? for more on the progress bar.)
Spark stages run tasks in parallel. In your case 5 tasks are running in parallel at the moment. If each task takes roughly the same time, this should give you an idea of how much longer you have to wait for this stage to finish.
But RDD.take can take more than one stage. take(1) will first get the first element of the first partition. If the first partition is empty, it will take the first elements from the second, third, fourth, and fifth partitions. The number of partitions it looks at in each stage is 4× the number of partitions already checked. So if you have a whole lot of empty partitions, take(1) can take many iterations. This can be the case for example if you have a large amount of data, then do filter(_.name == "John").take(1).
If you know your result will be small, you can save time by using collect instead of take(1). This will always gather all the data in a single stage. The main advantage is that in this case all the partitions will be processed in parallel, instead of the somewhat sequential manner of take.

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How to resume failed execution in MapReduce?

I have one requirement saying that -
a. Lets say i have 100GB of file/data
b. I have written Map Reduce job to process this data on certain logic.
c. I fired Map Reduce job, but it failed after reading 50GB
So my question is -
Can i resume the Map Reduce job from the 51th GB?
Please let me know if anybody have idea on how to do it, i don't want to reprocess the data which i processed before point of failure.
Thanks in advance
Brief answer: no.
And that's why working with large batch processing systems such as Hadoop or MPI is hard. Not only restarts of large jobs are inefficient from resource consumption point of view, but are also very psychologically depressive. That's why your primary goal is to reduce running time of single job to no more than couple of hours. Maybe it would be possible some day to implement "pausing" of jobs and "hot fixing" code, but currently it is not supported to my knowledge.
Solution #1. Split your job into error-prone parallelizable job and final error-free non-parallelizable job. Consider following example: you have hundreds of gigabytes of textual access logs from web server and you want to write job that will print how popular different browsers are. If you combine parsing and aggregating (summing) to a single huge job, then it's running time will be of order of days, and also chances that it will fail are very high because textual logs are usually hard to parse due to disambiguity. Much better idea is to split this job into two separate jobs:
First job is solely responsible for parsing log files. It prints only browser string as its output and even doesn't need to have any reducers. This job is the place for 99% of all errors because here is where parsing of "wild" data occurs. This job is parallelizable in the sense that you may split your input into chunks and process each chunk separately, so that each chunk is processed in 10-30 minutes. If job fails for some chunk, you fix it and restart; 30 minutes is not a big loss.
Second job is grand job that takes outputs from instances of first jobs and performs aggregation. Because aggregation code is very simple, this job is not likely to fail.
chunk(20G)->parse-job(20G)->browsers(0.5G)
chunk(20G)->parse-job(20G)->browsers(0.5G)
input(1T)->chunk(20G)->parse-job(20G)->browsers(0.5G)->aggregate-job->output
... .... ...
chunk(20G)->parse-job(20G)->browsers(0.5G)
Solution #2. Sometimes you may be satisfied with result even if parts of input data are dropped out. In this case you may set options mapred.max.map.failures.percent and/or mapred.max.reduce.failures.percent to non-zero values.
If your entire job fails, the output gets cleared, so you loose whatever you processed. However, Hadoop retries failed tasks of a job. So as long as your failure is recoverable within preconfigured number of attempts, a job will not fail and you are not going to loose output from already completed tasks.
If your failure is not recoverable, then in most cases it is your fault, and you might need to do one or more of the following:
Fix your code, even simple bug may cause all your tasks to consistently fail
Use less resources (e.g. care of available memory)
Better partition the problem (see if some tasks are fed more data than others or make sure task input is getting split into smaller chunks)
Have a bigger cluster capacity.

How long does it take to process the file If I have only one worker node?

Let's say I have a data with 25 blocks and the replication factor is 1. The mapper requires about 5 mins to read and process a single block of the data. Then how can I calculate the time for one worker node? The what about 15 nodes? Will the time be changed if we change the replication factor to 3?
I really need a help.
First of all I would advice reading some scientific papers regarding the issue (Google Scholar is a good starting point).
Now a bit of discussion. From my latest experiments I have concluded that processing time has very strong relation with amount of data you want to process (makes sense). On our cluster, on average it takes around 7-8 seconds for Mapper to read a block of 128MBytes. Now there are several factors which you need to consider in order to predict the overall execution time:
How much data the Mapper produces, which will determine moreless the time Hadoop requires to execute Shuffling
What Reducer is doing? Does it do some iterative processing? (might be slow!)
What is the configuration of the resources? (how many Mappers and Reducers are allowed to run on the same machine)
Finally are there other jobs running simultaneously? (this might be slowing down the jobs significantly, since your Reducer slots can be occupied waiting for data instead of doing useful things).
So already for one machine you are seeing the complexity of the task of predicting the time of job execution. Basically during my study I was able to conclude that in average one machine is capable of processing from 20-50 MBytes/second (the rate is calculated according to the following formula: total input size/total job running time). The processing rate includes the staging time (when your application is starting and uploading required files to the cluster for example). The processing rate is different for different use cases and greatly influenced by the input size and more importantly the amount of data produced by Mappers (once again this values are for our infrastructure and on different machine configuration you will be seeing completely different execution times).
When you start scaling your experiments, you would see in average improved performance, but once again from my study I could conclude that it is not linear and you would need to fit by yourself, for your own infrastructure the model with respective variables which would approximate the job execution time.
Just to give you an idea, I will share some part of the results. The rate when executing determine use case on 1 node was ~46MBytes/second, for 2 nodes it was ~73MBytes/second and for 3 nodes it was ~85MBytes/second (in my case the replication factor was equal to the number of nodes).
The problem is complex requires time, patience and some analytical skills to solve it. Have fun!

What's the best Task scheduling algorithm for some given tasks?

We have a list of tasks with different length, a number of cpu cores and a Context Switch time.
We want to find the best scheduling of tasks among the cores to maximize processor utilization.
How could we find this?
Isn't it like if we choose the biggest available tasks from the list and give them one by one to the current ready cores, it's going to be best or you think we must try all orders to find out which is the best?
I must add that all cores are ready at the time unit 0 and the tasks are supposed to work concurrently.
The idea here is that there's no silver bullet, for what you must consider what are the types of tasks being executed, and try to schedule them as nicely as possible.
CPU-bound tasks don't use much communication (I/O), and thus, need to be continuously executed, and interrupted only when necessary -- according to the policy being used;
I/O-bound tasks may be continuously put aside in the execution, allowing other processes to work, since it will be sleeping for many periods, waiting for data to be retrieved to primary memory;
interative tasks must be continuously executed, but needs not to be executed without interruptions, as it will generate interruptions, waiting for user inputs, but it needs to have a high priority, in order not to let the user notice delays in the execution.
Considering this, and the context switch costs, you must evaluate what types of tasks you have, choosing, thus, one or more policies for your scheduler.
Edit:
I thought this was a simply conceptual question. Considering you have to implement a solution, you must analyze the requirements.
Since you have the length of the tasks, and the context switch times, and you have to maintain the cores busy, this becomes an optimization problem, where you must keep the minimal number of cores idle when it reaches the end of the processes, but you need to maintain the minimum number of context switches, so that your overall execution time does not grow too much.
As pointed by svick, this sounds like a partition problem, which is NP-complete, and in which you need to divide a sequence of numbers into a given number of lists, so that the sum of each list is equal to each other.
In your problem you'd have a relaxation on the objective, so that you no longer need all the cores to execute the same amount of time, but you want the difference between any two cores execution time to be as small as possible.
In the reference given by svick, you can see a dynamic programming approach that you may be able to map onto your problem.

How can I determine the appropriate number of tasks with GCD or similar?

I very often encounter situations where I have a large number of small operations that I want to carry out independently. In these cases, the number of operations is so large compared to the actual time each operation takes so simply creating a task for each operation is inappropriate due to overhead, even though GCD overhead is typically low.
So what you'd want to do is split up the number of operations into nice chunks where each task operates on a chunk. But how can I determine the appropriate number of tasks/chunks?
Testing, and profiling. What makes sense, and what works well is application specific.
Basically you need to decide on two things:
The number of worker processes/threads to generate
The size of the chunks they will work on
Play with the two numbers, and calculate their throughput (tasks completed per second * number of workers). Somewhere you'll find a good equilibrium between speed, number of workers, and number of tasks in a chunk.
You can make finding the right balance even simpler by feeding your workers a bunch of test data, essentially a benchmark, and measuring their throughput automatically while adjusting these two variables. Record the throughput for each combination of worker size/task chunk size, and output it at the end. The highest throughput is your best combination.
Finally, if how long a particular task takes really depends on the task itself (e.g. some tasks take X time, and while some take X*3 time, then you can can take a couple of approaches. Depending on the nature of your incoming work, you can try one of the following:
Feed your benchmark historical data - a bunch of real-world data to be processed that represents the actual kind of work that will come into your worker grid, and measure throughput using that example data.
Generate random-sized tasks that cross the spectrum of what you think you'll see, and pick the combination that seems to work best on average, across multiple sizes of tasks
If you can read the data in a task, and the data will give you an idea of whether or not that task will take X time, or X*3 (or something in between) you can use that information before processing the tasks themselves to dynamically adjust the worker/task size to achieve the best throughput depending on current workload. This approach is taken with Amazon EC2 where customers will spin-up extra VMs when needed to handle higher load, and spin them back down when load drops, for example.
Whatever you choose, any unknown speed issue should almost always involve some kind of demo benchmarking, if the speed at which it runs is critical to the success of your application (sometimes the time to process is so small, that it's negligible).
Good luck!

Controlling number of lines to be written to the output file

I am new to Hadoop programming.
I have a situation in which I want to stop writing <k3,v3> to my output file after n-lines.
In my program, I am sure that the output file will be sorted according to k3, but I don't want the entire list. I only want the first n.
Is there a mechanism in Hadoop to do this?
I couldn't find an Class/API for the same.
But, you could increment a Counter when the OutputCollector.collect() is called in the Reduce function. When the counter reaches the a certain value, stop calling the OutputCollector.collect().
It's a waste of CPU cycles because the reduce tasks keeps on running even after n lines are written to the o/p. There might be a better approach for the problem.

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