39,234 research outputs found
The Raincore Distributed Session Service for Networking Elements
Motivated by the explosive growth of the Internet, we study efficient and fault-tolerant distributed session layer
protocols for networking elements. These protocols are
designed to enable a network cluster to share the state
information necessary for balancing network traffic and
computation load among a group of networking elements.
In addition, in the presence of failures, they allow
network traffic to fail-over from failed networking
elements to healthy ones. To maximize the overall
network throughput of the networking cluster, we assume a unicast communication medium for these protocols. The Raincore Distributed Session Service is based on a fault-tolerant token protocol, and provides group membership, reliable multicast and mutual exclusion services in a networking environment. We show that this service provides atomic reliable multicast with consistent ordering. We also show that Raincore token protocol consumes less overhead than a broadcast-based protocol in this environment in terms of CPU task-switching. The Raincore technology was transferred to Rainfinity, a startup company that is focusing on software for Internet reliability and performance. Rainwall, Rainfinity’s first product, was developed using the Raincore Distributed Session Service. We present initial performance results of the Rainwall product that validates our design assumptions and goals
Promote-IT: An efficient Real-Time Tertiary-Storage Scheduler
Promote-IT is an efficient heuristic scheduler that provides QoS guarantees for accessing data from tertiary storage. It can deal with a wide variety of requests and jukebox hardware. It provides short response and confirmation times, and makes good use of the jukebox resources. It separates the scheduling and dispatching functionality and effectively uses this separation to dispatch tasks earlier than scheduled, provided that the resource constraints are respected and no task misses its deadline. To prove the efficiency of Promote-IT we implemented alternative schedulers based on different scheduling models and scheduling paradigms. The evaluation shows that Promote-IT performs better than the other heuristic schedulers. Additionally, Promote-IT provides response-times near the optimum in cases where the optimal scheduler can be computed
Bibliographic Analysis on Research Publications using Authors, Categorical Labels and the Citation Network
Bibliographic analysis considers the author's research areas, the citation
network and the paper content among other things. In this paper, we combine
these three in a topic model that produces a bibliographic model of authors,
topics and documents, using a nonparametric extension of a combination of the
Poisson mixed-topic link model and the author-topic model. This gives rise to
the Citation Network Topic Model (CNTM). We propose a novel and efficient
inference algorithm for the CNTM to explore subsets of research publications
from CiteSeerX. The publication datasets are organised into three corpora,
totalling to about 168k publications with about 62k authors. The queried
datasets are made available online. In three publicly available corpora in
addition to the queried datasets, our proposed model demonstrates an improved
performance in both model fitting and document clustering, compared to several
baselines. Moreover, our model allows extraction of additional useful knowledge
from the corpora, such as the visualisation of the author-topics network.
Additionally, we propose a simple method to incorporate supervision into topic
modelling to achieve further improvement on the clustering task.Comment: Preprint for Journal Machine Learnin
Exploiting replication in distributed systems
Techniques are examined for replicating data and execution in directly distributed systems: systems in which multiple processes interact directly with one another while continuously respecting constraints on their joint behavior. Directly distributed systems are often required to solve difficult problems, ranging from management of replicated data to dynamic reconfiguration in response to failures. It is shown that these problems reduce to more primitive, order-based consistency problems, which can be solved using primitives such as the reliable broadcast protocols. Moreover, given a system that implements reliable broadcast primitives, a flexible set of high-level tools can be provided for building a wide variety of directly distributed application programs
EOS: A project to investigate the design and construction of real-time distributed embedded operating systems
The EOS project is investigating the design and construction of a family of real-time distributed embedded operating systems for reliable, distributed aerospace applications. Using the real-time programming techniques developed in co-operation with NASA in earlier research, the project staff is building a kernel for a multiple processor networked system. The first six months of the grant included a study of scheduling in an object-oriented system, the design philosophy of the kernel, and the architectural overview of the operating system. In this report, the operating system and kernel concepts are described. An environment for the experiments has been built and several of the key concepts of the system have been prototyped. The kernel and operating system is intended to support future experimental studies in multiprocessing, load-balancing, routing, software fault-tolerance, distributed data base design, and real-time processing
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