5,369 research outputs found
Towards Adaptable and Adaptive Policy-Free Middleware
We believe that to fully support adaptive distributed applications,
middleware must itself be adaptable, adaptive and policy-free. In this paper we
present a new language-independent adaptable and adaptive policy framework
suitable for integration in a wide variety of middleware systems. This
framework facilitates the construction of adaptive distributed applications.
The framework addresses adaptability through its ability to represent a wide
range of specific middleware policies. Adaptiveness is supported by a rich
contextual model, through which an application programmer may control precisely
how policies should be selected for any particular interaction with the
middleware. A contextual pattern mechanism facilitates the succinct expression
of both coarse- and fine-grain policy contexts. Policies may be specified and
altered dynamically, and may themselves take account of dynamic conditions. The
framework contains no hard-wired policies; instead, all policies can be
configured.Comment: Submitted to Dependable and Adaptive Distributed Systems Track, ACM
SAC 200
Unified radio and network control across heterogeneous hardware platforms
Experimentation is an important step in the investigation of techniques for handling spectrum scarcity or the development of new waveforms in future wireless networks. However, it is impractical and not cost effective to construct custom platforms for each future network scenario to be investigated. This problem is addressed by defining Unified Programming Interfaces that allow common access to several platforms for experimentation-based prototyping, research, and development purposes. The design of these interfaces is driven by a diverse set of scenarios that capture the functionality relevant to future network implementations while trying to keep them as generic as possible. Herein, the definition of this set of scenarios is presented as well as the architecture for supporting experimentation-based wireless research over multiple hardware platforms. The proposed architecture for experimentation incorporates both local and global unified interfaces to control any aspect of a wireless system while being completely agnostic to the actual technology incorporated. Control is feasible from the low-level features of individual radios to the entire network stack, including hierarchical control combinations. A testbed to enable the use of the above architecture is utilized that uses a backbone network in order to be able to extract measurements and observe the overall behaviour of the system under test without imposing further communication overhead to the actual experiment. Based on the aforementioned architecture, a system is proposed that is able to support the advancement of intelligent techniques for future networks through experimentation while decoupling promising algorithms and techniques from the capabilities of a specific hardware platform
Tuning Parallel Applications in Parallel
Auto-tuning has recently received significant attention from the High Performance Computing
community. Most auto-tuning approaches are specialized to work either on specific domains such as
dense linear algebra and stencil computations, or only at certain stages of program execution such
as compile time and runtime. Real scientific applications, however, demand a cohesive environment that can efficiently provide auto-tuning solutions at all stages of application development and deployment. Towards that end, we describe a unified end-to-end approach to auto-tuning scientific applications. Our system, Active Harmony, takes a search-based collaborative approach to auto-tuning. Application programmers, library writers and compilers collaborate to describe and export a set of performance related tunable parameters to the Active Harmony system. These parameters define a tuning search-space. The auto-tuner monitors the program performance and suggests adaptation decisions. The decisions are made by a central controller using a parallel search algorithm. The algorithm leverages parallel architectures to search across a set of optimization parameter values. Different nodes of a parallel system evaluate different
configurations at each timestep.
Active Harmony supports runtime adaptive code-generation and tuning for parameters that require new code (e.g. unroll factors). Effectively, we merge traditional feedback directed optimization and
just-in-time compilation. This feature also enables application developers to write applications once and have the auto-tuner adjust the application behavior automatically when run on new systems. We evaluated our system on multiple large-scale parallel applications and showed that our system can improve the execution time by up to 46% compared to the original version of the program.
Finally, we believe that the success of any auto-tuning research depends on how effectively
application developers, domain-experts and auto-tuners communicate and work together. To that end, we have developed and released a simple and extensible language that standardizes the parameter space representation. Using this language, developers and researchers can collaborate to export tunable parameters to the tuning frameworks. Relationships (e.g. ordering, dependencies,
constraints, ranking) between tunable parameters and search-hints can also be expressed
Recommended from our members
Multimedia delivery in the future internet
The term “Networked Media” implies that all kinds of media including text, image, 3D graphics, audio
and video are produced, distributed, shared, managed and consumed on-line through various networks,
like the Internet, Fiber, WiFi, WiMAX, GPRS, 3G and so on, in a convergent manner [1]. This white
paper is the contribution of the Media Delivery Platform (MDP) cluster and aims to cover the Networked
challenges of the Networked Media in the transition to the Future of the Internet.
Internet has evolved and changed the way we work and live. End users of the Internet have been confronted
with a bewildering range of media, services and applications and of technological innovations concerning
media formats, wireless networks, terminal types and capabilities. And there is little evidence that the pace
of this innovation is slowing. Today, over one billion of users access the Internet on regular basis, more
than 100 million users have downloaded at least one (multi)media file and over 47 millions of them do so
regularly, searching in more than 160 Exabytes1 of content. In the near future these numbers are expected
to exponentially rise. It is expected that the Internet content will be increased by at least a factor of 6, rising
to more than 990 Exabytes before 2012, fuelled mainly by the users themselves. Moreover, it is envisaged
that in a near- to mid-term future, the Internet will provide the means to share and distribute (new)
multimedia content and services with superior quality and striking flexibility, in a trusted and personalized
way, improving citizens’ quality of life, working conditions, edutainment and safety.
In this evolving environment, new transport protocols, new multimedia encoding schemes, cross-layer inthe
network adaptation, machine-to-machine communication (including RFIDs), rich 3D content as well as
community networks and the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays are expected to generate new models of
interaction and cooperation, and be able to support enhanced perceived quality-of-experience (PQoE) and
innovative applications “on the move”, like virtual collaboration environments, personalised services/
media, virtual sport groups, on-line gaming, edutainment. In this context, the interaction with content
combined with interactive/multimedia search capabilities across distributed repositories, opportunistic P2P
networks and the dynamic adaptation to the characteristics of diverse mobile terminals are expected to
contribute towards such a vision.
Based on work that has taken place in a number of EC co-funded projects, in Framework Program 6 (FP6)
and Framework Program 7 (FP7), a group of experts and technology visionaries have voluntarily
contributed in this white paper aiming to describe the status, the state-of-the art, the challenges and the way
ahead in the area of Content Aware media delivery platforms
Synapse: Synthetic Application Profiler and Emulator
We introduce Synapse motivated by the needs to estimate and emulate workload
execution characteristics on high-performance and distributed heterogeneous
resources. Synapse has a platform independent application profiler, and the
ability to emulate profiled workloads on a variety of heterogeneous resources.
Synapse is used as a proxy application (or "representative application") for
real workloads, with the added advantage that it can be tuned at arbitrary
levels of granularity in ways that are simply not possible using real
applications. Experiments show that automated profiling using Synapse
represents application characteristics with high fidelity. Emulation using
Synapse can reproduce the application behavior in the original runtime
environment, as well as reproducing properties when used in a different
run-time environments
- …