Comparison of Distributed Data-Parallelization Patterns for Big Data Analysis : A Bioinformatics Case Study

As a distributed data-parallelization (DDP) pattern, MapReduce has been adopted by many new big data analysis tools to achieve good scalability and performance in Cluster or Cloud environments. This paper explores how two binary DDP patterns, i.e., CoGroup and Match, could also be used in these tools. We reimplemented an existing bioinformatics tool, called CloudBurst, with three different DDP pattern combinations. We identify two factors, namely, input data balancing and value sparseness, which could greatly affect the performances using different DDP patterns. Our experiments show: (i) a simple DDP pattern switch could speed up performance by almost two times; (ii) the identified factors can explain the differences well.