9,189 research outputs found
Middleware-based Database Replication: The Gaps between Theory and Practice
The need for high availability and performance in data management systems has
been fueling a long running interest in database replication from both academia
and industry. However, academic groups often attack replication problems in
isolation, overlooking the need for completeness in their solutions, while
commercial teams take a holistic approach that often misses opportunities for
fundamental innovation. This has created over time a gap between academic
research and industrial practice.
This paper aims to characterize the gap along three axes: performance,
availability, and administration. We build on our own experience developing and
deploying replication systems in commercial and academic settings, as well as
on a large body of prior related work. We sift through representative examples
from the last decade of open-source, academic, and commercial database
replication systems and combine this material with case studies from real
systems deployed at Fortune 500 customers. We propose two agendas, one for
academic research and one for industrial R&D, which we believe can bridge the
gap within 5-10 years. This way, we hope to both motivate and help researchers
in making the theory and practice of middleware-based database replication more
relevant to each other.Comment: 14 pages. Appears in Proc. ACM SIGMOD International Conference on
Management of Data, Vancouver, Canada, June 200
Cache Serializability: Reducing Inconsistency in Edge Transactions
Read-only caches are widely used in cloud infrastructures to reduce access
latency and load on backend databases. Operators view coherent caches as
impractical at genuinely large scale and many client-facing caches are updated
in an asynchronous manner with best-effort pipelines. Existing solutions that
support cache consistency are inapplicable to this scenario since they require
a round trip to the database on every cache transaction.
Existing incoherent cache technologies are oblivious to transactional data
access, even if the backend database supports transactions. We propose T-Cache,
a novel caching policy for read-only transactions in which inconsistency is
tolerable (won't cause safety violations) but undesirable (has a cost). T-Cache
improves cache consistency despite asynchronous and unreliable communication
between the cache and the database. We define cache-serializability, a variant
of serializability that is suitable for incoherent caches, and prove that with
unbounded resources T-Cache implements this new specification. With limited
resources, T-Cache allows the system manager to choose a trade-off between
performance and consistency.
Our evaluation shows that T-Cache detects many inconsistencies with only
nominal overhead. We use synthetic workloads to demonstrate the efficacy of
T-Cache when data accesses are clustered and its adaptive reaction to workload
changes. With workloads based on the real-world topologies, T-Cache detects
43-70% of the inconsistencies and increases the rate of consistent transactions
by 33-58%.Comment: Ittay Eyal, Ken Birman, Robbert van Renesse, "Cache Serializability:
Reducing Inconsistency in Edge Transactions," Distributed Computing Systems
(ICDCS), IEEE 35th International Conference on, June~29 2015--July~2 201
The NorduGrid architecture and tools
The NorduGrid project designed a Grid architecture with the primary goal to
meet the requirements of production tasks of the LHC experiments. While it is
meant to be a rather generic Grid system, it puts emphasis on batch processing
suitable for problems encountered in High Energy Physics. The NorduGrid
architecture implementation uses the \globus{} as the foundation for various
components, developed by the project. While introducing new services, the
NorduGrid does not modify the Globus tools, such that the two can eventually
co-exist. The NorduGrid topology is decentralized, avoiding a single point of
failure. The NorduGrid architecture is thus a light-weight, non-invasive and
dynamic one, while robust and scalable, capable of meeting most challenging
tasks of High Energy Physics.Comment: Talk from the 2003 Computing in High Energy Physics and Nuclear
Physics (CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003, 9 pages,LaTeX, 4 figures.
PSN MOAT00
The Signal Data Explorer: A high performance Grid based signal search tool for use in distributed diagnostic applications
We describe a high performance Grid based signal search tool for distributed diagnostic applications developed in conjunction with Rolls-Royce plc for civil aero engine condition monitoring applications. With the introduction of advanced monitoring technology into engineering systems, healthcare, etc., the associated diagnostic processes are increasingly required to handle and consider vast amounts of data. An exemplar of such a diagnosis process was developed during the DAME project, which built a proof of concept demonstrator to assist in the enhanced diagnosis and prognosis of aero-engine conditions. In particular it has shown the utility of an interactive viewing and high performance distributed search tool (the Signal Data Explorer) in the aero-engine diagnostic process. The viewing and search techniques are equally applicable to other domains. The Signal Data Explorer and search services have been demonstrated on the Worldwide Universities Network to search distributed databases of electrocardiograph data
Software Platforms for Smart Cities: Concepts, Requirements, Challenges, and a Unified Reference Architecture
Making cities smarter help improve city services and increase citizens'
quality of life. Information and communication technologies (ICT) are
fundamental for progressing towards smarter city environments. Smart City
software platforms potentially support the development and integration of Smart
City applications. However, the ICT community must overcome current significant
technological and scientific challenges before these platforms can be widely
used. This paper surveys the state-of-the-art in software platforms for Smart
Cities. We analyzed 23 projects with respect to the most used enabling
technologies, as well as functional and non-functional requirements,
classifying them into four categories: Cyber-Physical Systems, Internet of
Things, Big Data, and Cloud Computing. Based on these results, we derived a
reference architecture to guide the development of next-generation software
platforms for Smart Cities. Finally, we enumerated the most frequently cited
open research challenges, and discussed future opportunities. This survey gives
important references for helping application developers, city managers, system
operators, end-users, and Smart City researchers to make project, investment,
and research decisions.Comment: Accepted for publication in ACM Computing Survey
Context Aware Computing for The Internet of Things: A Survey
As we are moving towards the Internet of Things (IoT), the number of sensors
deployed around the world is growing at a rapid pace. Market research has shown
a significant growth of sensor deployments over the past decade and has
predicted a significant increment of the growth rate in the future. These
sensors continuously generate enormous amounts of data. However, in order to
add value to raw sensor data we need to understand it. Collection, modelling,
reasoning, and distribution of context in relation to sensor data plays
critical role in this challenge. Context-aware computing has proven to be
successful in understanding sensor data. In this paper, we survey context
awareness from an IoT perspective. We present the necessary background by
introducing the IoT paradigm and context-aware fundamentals at the beginning.
Then we provide an in-depth analysis of context life cycle. We evaluate a
subset of projects (50) which represent the majority of research and commercial
solutions proposed in the field of context-aware computing conducted over the
last decade (2001-2011) based on our own taxonomy. Finally, based on our
evaluation, we highlight the lessons to be learnt from the past and some
possible directions for future research. The survey addresses a broad range of
techniques, methods, models, functionalities, systems, applications, and
middleware solutions related to context awareness and IoT. Our goal is not only
to analyse, compare and consolidate past research work but also to appreciate
their findings and discuss their applicability towards the IoT.Comment: IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials Journal, 201
DOH: A Content Delivery Peer-to-Peer Network
Many SMEs and non-pro¯t organizations su®er when their Web
servers become unavailable due to °ash crowd e®ects when their web site
becomes popular. One of the solutions to the °ash-crowd problem is to place
the web site on a scalable CDN (Content Delivery Network) that replicates
the content and distributes the load in order to improve its response time.
In this paper, we present our approach to building a scalable Web Hosting
environment as a CDN on top of a structured peer-to-peer system of collaborative
web-servers integrated to share the load and to improve the overall
system performance, scalability, availability and robustness. Unlike clusterbased
solutions, it can run on heterogeneous hardware, over geographically
dispersed areas. To validate and evaluate our approach, we have developed a
system prototype called DOH (DKS Organized Hosting) that is a CDN implemented
on top of the DKS (Distributed K-nary Search) structured P2P
system with DHT (Distributed Hash table) functionality [9]. The prototype
is implemented in Java, using the DKS middleware, the Jetty web-server, and
a modi¯ed JavaFTP server. The proposed design of CDN has been evaluated
by simulation and by evaluation experiments on the prototype
- …