Designing a Collaborative Filtering Recommender on the Single Chip Cloud Computer

Abstract

Fast response requirements for big-data applications on cloud infrastructures continues to grow. At the same time, many cores on-chip have now become a reality. These developments are set to redefine infrastructure nodes of cloud data centers in the future. For this to happen, parallel programming runtimes need to be designed for many-cores on chip as the target architecture. In this paper, we show that the commonly used MapReduce programming paradigm can be adapted to run on Intel's experimental single chip cloud computer (SCC) with 48-cores on chip. We demonstrate this using a Collaborative Filtering (CF) recommender system as an application. This is a widely used technique for information filtering to predict user's preference towards an unknown item from their past ratings. These systems are typically deployed in distributed clusters and operate on large apriori datasets. We address scalability with data partitioning, combining and sorting algorithms, maximize data locality to minimize communication cost within the SCC cores. We demonstrate ~2x speedup, ~94% lower energy consumption for benchmark workloads as compared to a distributed cluster of single and multi-processor nodes.