Darren A. Shakib

SCOPE: easy and efficient parallel processing of massive data sets

Companies providing cloud-scale services have an increasing need to store and analyze massive data sets such as search logs and click streams. For cost and performance reasons, processing is typically done on large clusters of shared-nothing commodity machines. It is imperative to develop a programming model that hides the complexity of the underlying system but provides flexibility by allowing users to extend functionality to meet a variety of requirements. In this paper, we present a new declarative and extensible scripting language, SCOPE (Structured Computations Optimized for Parallel Execution), targeted for this type of massive data analysis. The language is designed for ease of use with no explicit parallelism, while being amenable to efficient parallel execution on large clusters. SCOPE borrows several features from SQL. Data is modeled as sets of rows composed of typed columns. The select statement is retained with inner joins, outer joins, and aggregation allowed. Users can easily define their own functions and implement their own versions of operators: extractors (parsing and constructing rows from a file), processors (row-wise processing), reducers (group-wise processing), and combiners (combining rows from two inputs). SCOPE supports nesting of expressions but also allows a computation to be specified as a series of steps, in a manner often preferred by programmers. We also describe how scripts are compiled into efficient, parallel execution plans and executed on large clusters.

SCOPE: parallel databases meet MapReduce

Companies providing cloud-scale data services have increasing needs to store and analyze massive data sets, such as search logs, click streams, and web graph data. For cost and performance reasons, processing is typically done on large clusters of tens of thousands of commodity machines. Such massive data analysis on large clusters presents new opportunities and challenges for developing a highly scalable and efficient distributed computation system that is easy to program and supports complex system optimization to maximize performance and reliability. In this paper, we describe a distributed computation system, Structured Computations Optimized for Parallel Execution (Scope), targeted for this type of massive data analysis. Scope combines benefits from both traditional parallel databases and MapReduce execution engines to allow easy programmability and deliver massive scalability and high performance through advanced optimization. Similar to parallel databases, the system has a SQL-like declarative scripting language with no explicit parallelism, while being amenable to efficient parallel execution on large clusters. An optimizer is responsible for converting scripts into efficient execution plans for the distributed computation engine. A physical execution plan consists of a directed acyclic graph of vertices. Execution of the plan is orchestrated by a job manager that schedules execution on available machines and provides fault tolerance and recovery, much like MapReduce systems. Scope is being used daily for a variety of data analysis and data mining applications over tens of thousands of machines at Microsoft, powering Bing, and other online services.