Scientific analyses commonly compose multiple single-process programs into a dataflow. An end-to-end dataflow of single-process programs is known as a many-task application. Typically, HPC tools are used to parallelize these analyses. In this work, we investigate an alternate approach that uses Apache Spark—a modern platform for data intensive computing—to parallelize many-task applications. We implement Kira, a flexible and distributed astronomy image processing toolkit, and its Source Extractor

(Kira SE) application. Using Kira SE as a case study, we examine the programming flexibility, dataflow richness, scheduling capacity and performance of Apache Spark running on the Amazon EC2 cloud. By exploiting data locality, Kira SE achieves a 4.1 speedup over an equivalent C program when analyzing a 1TB dataset using 512 cores on the Amazon EC2 cloud. Furthermore, Kira SE on the Amazon EC2 cloud achieves a 1.8 speedup over the C program on the NERSC Edison supercomputer. A 128-core Amazon EC2 cloud deployment of Kira SE using Spark Streaming can achieve a second-scale latency with a sustained throughput of 800 MB/s.

Our experience with Kira demonstrates that data intensive computing platforms like Apache Spark are a performant alternative for many-task scientific applications.