A New Speculative Execution Algorithm Based on C4.5 Decision Tree for Hadoop

As a distributed computing platform, Hadoop provides an effective way to handle big data. In Hadoop, the completion time of job will be delayed by a straggler. Although the definitive cause of the straggler is hard to detect, speculative execution is usually used for dealing with this problem, by simply backing up those stragglers on alternative nodes. In this paper, we design a new Speculative Execution algorithm based on C4.5 Decision Tree, SECDT, for Hadoop. In SECDT, we speculate completion time of stragglers and also of backup tasks, based on a kind of decision tree method: C4.5 decision tree. After we speculate the completion time, we compare the completion time of stragglers and of the backup tasks, calculating their differential value, and selecting the straggler with the maximum differential value to start the backup task. Experiment result shows that the SECDT can predict execution time more accurately than other speculative execution methods, hence reduce the job completion time.