Reducing Late-Timing Failure at Scale: Straggler Root-Cause Analysis in Cloud Datacenters

Task stragglers hinder effective parallel job execution in Cloud datacenters, resulting in late-timing failures due to the violation of specified timing constraints. Stragglertolerant methods such as speculative execution provide limited effectiveness due to (i) lack of precise straggler root-cause knowledge and (ii) straggler identification occurring too late within a job lifecycle. This paper proposes a method to ascertain underlying straggler root-causes by analyzing key parameters within large-scale distributed systems, and to determine the correlation between straggler occurrence and factors including resource contention, task concurrency, and server failures. Our preliminary study of a production Cloud datacenter indicates that the dominate straggler root-cause is resultant of high temporal resource contention. The result can assist in enhancing straggler prediction and mitigation for tolerating late-timing failures within large-scale distributed systems.