A parallel spatial data analysis infrastructure for the cloud

Spatial data analysis applications are emerging from a wide range of domains such as building information management, environmental assessments and medical imaging. Time-consuming computational geometry algorithms make these applications slow, even for medium-sized datasets. At the same time, there is a rapid expansion in available processing cores, through multicore machines and Cloud computing. The confluence of these trends demands effective parallelization of spatial query processing. Unfortunately, traditional parallel spatial databases are ill-equipped to deal with the performance heterogeneity that is common in the Cloud.

We introduce Niharika, a parallel spatial data analysis infrastructure that exploits all available cores in a heterogeneous cluster. Niharika first uses a declustering technique that creates balanced spatial partitions. Then, Niharika adapts to performance heterogeneity and processing skew in the spatial dataset using dynamic load-balancing. We evaluate Niharika with three load-balancing algorithms and two different spatial datasets (both from TIGER) using Amazon EC2 instances. Niharika adapts to the performance heterogeneity in the EC2 nodes, thereby achieving excellent speedups (e.g., 63.6X using 64 cores on 16 4-core EC2 nodes, in the best case) and outperforming an approach that does not adapt.