ALLUXIO COMMUNITY OFFICE HOUR
Apache Spark has been widely adopted for in-memory data analytics at scale, however, efficient memory utilization is a common challenge, and users will either run out of memory or experience low and unstable performance. Many Spark users may not be aware of the differences in memory utilization between caching data directly in-memory into the Spark JVM versus storing data off-heap via an in-memory storage service like Alluxio. In this office hour, I will highlight the two approaches with a demo and open up for discussions
In this Office Hour we’ll go over:
- How to run Spark shell with Alluxio such that Spark jobs
- A demo to compare the memory usage between Spark cache and using Alluxio as the external off-heap caching service
- Open Session for discussion on any topics such as running Presto on Alluxio, and more
ALLUXIO COMMUNITY OFFICE HOUR
Apache Spark has been widely adopted for in-memory data analytics at scale, however, efficient memory utilization is a common challenge, and users will either run out of memory or experience low and unstable performance. Many Spark users may not be aware of the differences in memory utilization between caching data directly in-memory into the Spark JVM versus storing data off-heap via an in-memory storage service like Alluxio. In this office hour, I will highlight the two approaches with a demo and open up for discussions
In this Office Hour we’ll go over:
- How to run Spark shell with Alluxio such that Spark jobs
- A demo to compare the memory usage between Spark cache and using Alluxio as the external off-heap caching service
- Open Session for discussion on any topics such as running Presto on Alluxio, and more
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Fireworks AI is a leading inference cloud provider for Generative AI, powering real-time inference and fine-tuning services for customers' applications that require minimal latency, high throughput, and high concurrency. Their GPU infrastructure spans 10+ clouds and 15+ regions, serving enterprises and developers deploying production AI workloads at scale.
With model sizes reaching 70GB+, Fireworks AI faced critical challenges: eliminating cold start delays, managing highly concurrent model downloads across GPU clusters, reducing tens of thousands in annual cloud egress costs, and automating manual pipeline management that consumed 4+ hours weekly. They chose Alluxio as their solution to scale with their hyper-growth without requiring dedicated infrastructure resources.
In this tech talk, Akram Bawayah, Software Engineer at Fireworks AI, and Bin Fan, VP of Technology at Alluxio, share how Fireworks AI uses Alluxio to power their multi-cloud inference infrastructure.
They discuss:
- How Fireworks AI uses Alluxio in its high-performance model distribution system to deliver fast, reliable inference across multiple clouds
- How implementing Alluxio distributed caching achieved 1TB/s+ model deployment throughput, reducing model loading from hours to minutes while significantly cutting cloud egress costs
- How to simplify infrastructure operations and seamlessly scale model distribution across multi-cloud GPU environments

