2016 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC '16)

The ability to move data quickly between the nodes of a distributed system is important for the performance of cluster computing frameworks, such as Hadoop and Spark. We show that in a cluster with modern networking technology data serialization is the main bottleneck and source of overhead in the transfer of rich data in systems based on high-level programming languages such as Java. We propose a new data transfer mechanism that avoids serialization altogether by using a shared clusterwide address space to store data. The design and a prototype implementation of this approach are described. We show that our mechanism is significantly faster than serialized data transfer, and propose a number of possible applications for it.