Monitoring and analysis system for performance troubleshooting in data centers

It was not long ago. On Christmas Eve 2012, a war of troubleshooting began in Amazon data centers. It started at 12:24 PM, with an mistaken deletion of the state data of Amazon Elastic Load Balancing Service (ELB for short), which was not realized at that time. The mistake first led to a local issue that a small number of ELB service APIs were affected. In about six minutes, it evolved into a critical one that EC2 customers were significantly affected. One example was that Netflix, which was using hundreds of Amazon ELB services, was experiencing an extensive streaming service outage when many customers could not watch TV shows or movies on Christmas Eve. It took Amazon engineers 5 hours 42 minutes to find the root cause, the mistaken deletion, and another 15 hours and 32 minutes to fully recover the ELB service. The war ended at 8:15 AM the next day and brought the performance troubleshooting in data centers to world’s attention. As shown in this Amazon ELB case.Troubleshooting runtime performance issues is crucial in time-sensitive multi-tier cloud services because of their stringent end-to-end timing requirements, but it is also notoriously difficult and time consuming. To address the troubleshooting challenge, this dissertation proposes VScope, a flexible monitoring and analysis system for online troubleshooting in data centers. VScope provides primitive operations which data center operators can use to troubleshoot various performance issues. Each operation is essentially a series of monitoring and analysis functions executed on an overlay network. We design a novel software architecture for VScope so that the overlay networks can be generated, executed and terminated automatically, on-demand. From the troubleshooting side, we design novel anomaly detection algorithms and implement them in VScope. By running anomaly detection algorithms in VScope, data center operators are notified when performance anomalies happen. We also design a graph-based guidance approach, called VFocus, which tracks the interactions among hardware and software components in data centers. VFocus provides primitive operations by which operators can analyze the interactions to find out which components are relevant to the performance issue. VScope’s capabilities and performance are evaluated on a testbed with over 1000 virtual machines (VMs). Experimental results show that the VScope runtime negligibly perturbs system and application performance, and requires mere seconds to deploy monitoring and analytics functions on over 1000 nodes. This demonstrates VScope’s ability to support fast operation and online queries against a comprehensive set of application to system/platform level metrics, and a variety of representative analytics functions. When supporting algorithms with high computation complexity, VScope serves as a ‘thin layer’ that occupies no more than 5% of their total latency. Further, by using VFocus, VScope can locate problematic VMs that cannot be found via solely application-level monitoring, and in one of the use cases explored in the dissertation, it operates with levels of perturbation of over 400% less than what is seen for brute-force and most sampling-based approaches. We also validate VFocus with real-world data center traces. The experimental results show that VFocus has troubleshooting accuracy of 83% on average.Ph.D

Hardware Acceleration for Unstructured Big Data and Natural Language Processing.

The confluence of the rapid growth in electronic data in recent years, and the renewed interest in domain-specific hardware accelerators presents exciting technical opportunities. Traditional scale-out solutions for processing the vast amounts of text data have been shown to be energy- and cost-inefficient. In contrast, custom hardware accelerators can provide higher throughputs, lower latencies, and significant energy savings. In this thesis, I present a set of hardware accelerators for unstructured big-data processing and natural language processing. The first accelerator, called HAWK, aims to speed up the processing of ad hoc queries against large in-memory logs. HAWK is motivated by the observation that traditional software-based tools for processing large text corpora use memory bandwidth inefficiently due to software overheads, and, thus, fall far short of peak scan rates possible on modern memory systems. HAWK is designed to process data at a constant rate of 32 GB/s—faster than most extant memory systems. I demonstrate that HAWK outperforms state-of-the-art software solutions for text processing, almost by an order of magnitude in many cases. HAWK occupies an area of 45 sq-mm in its pareto-optimal configuration and consumes 22 W of power, well within the area and power envelopes of modern CPU chips. The second accelerator I propose aims to speed up similarity measurement calculations for semantic search in the natural language processing space. By leveraging the latency hiding concepts of multi-threading and simple scheduling mechanisms, my design maximizes functional unit utilization. This similarity measurement accelerator provides speedups of 36x-42x over optimized software running on server-class cores, while requiring 56x-58x lower energy, and only 1.3% of the area.PhDComputer Science and EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/116712/1/prateekt_1.pd

Methodological challenges and analytic opportunities for modeling and interpreting Big Healthcare Data

Abstract Managing, processing and understanding big healthcare data is challenging, costly and demanding. Without a robust fundamental theory for representation, analysis and inference, a roadmap for uniform handling and analyzing of such complex data remains elusive. In this article, we outline various big data challenges, opportunities, modeling methods and software techniques for blending complex healthcare data, advanced analytic tools, and distributed scientific computing. Using imaging, genetic and healthcare data we provide examples of processing heterogeneous datasets using distributed cloud services, automated and semi-automated classification techniques, and open-science protocols. Despite substantial advances, new innovative technologies need to be developed that enhance, scale and optimize the management and processing of large, complex and heterogeneous data. Stakeholder investments in data acquisition, research and development, computational infrastructure and education will be critical to realize the huge potential of big data, to reap the expected information benefits and to build lasting knowledge assets. Multi-faceted proprietary, open-source, and community developments will be essential to enable broad, reliable, sustainable and efficient data-driven discovery and analytics. Big data will affect every sector of the economy and their hallmark will be ‘team science’.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/134522/1/13742_2016_Article_117.pd

ST-Hadoop: A MapReduce Framework for Big Spatio-temporal Data Management

University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation.May 2019. Major: Computer Science. Advisor: Mohamed Mokbel. 1 computer file (PDF); x, 123 pages.Apache Hadoop, employing the MapReduce programming paradigm, that has been widely accepted as the standard framework for analyzing big data in distributed environments. Unfortunately, this rich framework was not genuinely exploited towards processing large scale spatio-temporal data, especially with the emergence and popularity of applications that create them in large-scale. The huge volumes of spatio-temporal data come from applications, like Taxi fleet in urban computing, Asteroids in astronomy research studies, animal movements in habitat studies, neuron analysis in neuroscience research studies, and contents of social networks (e.g., Twitter or Facebook). Managing space and time are two fundamental characteristics that raised the demand for processing spatio-temporal data created by these applications. Besides the massive size of data, the complexity of shapes and formats associated with these data raised many challenges in managing spatio-temporal data. The goal of the dissertation is centered on establishing a full-fledged big spatio-temporal data management system that serves the need for a wide range of spatio-temporal applications. This involves indexing, querying, and analyzing spatio-temporal data. We propose ST-Hadoop; the first full-fledged open-source system with native support for big spatio-temporal data, available to download http://st-hadoop.cs.umn.edu/. ST- Hadoop injects spatio-temporal data awareness inside the highly popular Hadoop system that is considered state-of-the-art for off-line analysis of big data systems. Considering a distributed environment, we focus on the following: (1) indexing spatio-temporal data and (2) Supporting various fundamental spatio-temporal operations, such as range, kNN, and join (3) Supporting indexing and querying trajectories, which is considered as a special class of spatio-temporal data that require special handling. Throughout this dissertation, we will touch base on the background and related work, motivate for the proposed system, and highlight our contributions

Characterization of user mobility trajectories by implementing clustering techniques

Current and legacy technologies for wireless communications are facing an explosive demand of capacity and resources, triggered by an exponential growing of traffic, mainly due to the proliferation of smartphones and the introduction of demanding multimedia and video applications. There is the anticipation that future generation of wireless communications systems, 5G, will attend the growing demand on capacity and network resources, along with the necessity for blending novel technology concepts including Internet of Things, machine communications, the introduction of heterogeneous network architectures, massive arrays of antennas and dynamic spectrum allocation, among others. Moreover, self-organizing networks (SON) functions incorporated in present mobile communication standards provide limited levels of proactivity. Therefore, it is foreseen that future network are required of highly automation and real-time reaction to network problems, topology changes and dynamic parameterization. The flexibility to be introduced in 5G networks by incorporating virtualized hardware architecture and cloud computing, allow the inclusion of big data analytics capabilities for finding insights and taking advantage of the vast amounts of data generated in the network system. The full embodiment of big data analytics among the Radio Access Network optimization and planning processes, allow gathering an end to end knowledge and reaching the individual user level granularity. The purpose of this work is to provide a case of study for smartly processing collected data from mobility traces by using a hierarchical clustering function, an unsupervised method of data analytics, for characterizing the different user mobility trajectories to extract an individual user mobility profile. The methodology proposed references a knowledge discovery framework which uses Artificial Intelligence processes for finding insights in collected network data and the use of this knowledge for driving SON functions, other optimization and planning processes, and novel operator business cases

Deep Learning para BigData

We live in a world where data is becoming increasingly valuable and increasingly abundant in volume. Every company produces data, be it from sales, sensors, and various other sources. Since the dawn of the smartphone, virtually every person in the world is connected to the internet and contributes to data generation. Social networks are big contributors to this Big Data boom. How do we extract insight from such a rich data environment? Is Deep Learning capable of circumventing Big Data’s challenges? This is what we intend to understand. To reach a conclusion, Social Network data is used as a case study for predicting sentiment changes in the Stock Market. The objective of this dissertation is to develop a computational study and analyse its performance. The outputs will contribute to understand Deep Learning’s usage with Big Data and how it acts in Sentiment analysis.Vivemos num mundo onde dados são cada vez mais valiosos e abundantes. Todas as empresas produzem dados, sejam eles provenientes de valores de vendas, parâmetros de sensores bem como de outras diversas fontes. Desde que os smartphones se tornaram pessoais, o mundo tornou-se mais conectado, já que virtualmente todas as pessoas passaram a ter a internet na ponta dos dedos. Esta explosão tecnológica foi acompanhada por uma explosão de dados. As redes sociais têm um grande contributo para a quantidade de dados produzida. Mas como se analisam estes dados? Será que Deep Learning poderá dar a volta aos desafios que Big Data traz inerentemente? É isso se pretende perceber. Para chegar a uma conclusão, foi utilizado um caso de estudo de redes sociais para previsão de alterações nas ações de mercados financeiros relacionadas com as opiniões dos utilizadores destas. O objetivo desta dissertação é o desenvolvimento de um estudo computacional e a análise da sua performance. Os resultados contribuirão para entender o uso de Deep Learning com Big Data, com especial foco em análise de sentimento. The objective of this dissertation is to develop a computational study and analyse its performance. The outputs will contribute to understand Deep Learning’s usage with Big Data and how it acts in Sentiment analysis

Numerical Simulations of the Dark Universe: State of the Art and the Next Decade

We present a review of the current state of the art of cosmological dark matter simulations, with particular emphasis on the implications for dark matter detection efforts and studies of dark energy. This review is intended both for particle physicists, who may find the cosmological simulation literature opaque or confusing, and for astro-physicists, who may not be familiar with the role of simulations for observational and experimental probes of dark matter and dark energy. Our work is complementary to the contribution by M. Baldi in this issue, which focuses on the treatment of dark energy and cosmic acceleration in dedicated N-body simulations. Truly massive dark matter-only simulations are being conducted on national supercomputing centers, employing from several billion to over half a trillion particles to simulate the formation and evolution of cosmologically representative volumes (cosmic scale) or to zoom in on individual halos (cluster and galactic scale). These simulations cost millions of core-hours, require tens to hundreds of terabytes of memory, and use up to petabytes of disk storage. The field is quite internationally diverse, with top simulations having been run in China, France, Germany, Korea, Spain, and the USA. Predictions from such simulations touch on almost every aspect of dark matter and dark energy studies, and we give a comprehensive overview of this connection. We also discuss the limitations of the cold and collisionless DM-only approach, and describe in some detail efforts to include different particle physics as well as baryonic physics in cosmological galaxy formation simulations, including a discussion of recent results highlighting how the distribution of dark matter in halos may be altered. We end with an outlook for the next decade, presenting our view of how the field can be expected to progress. (abridged)Comment: 54 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables; invited contribution to the special issue "The next decade in Dark Matter and Dark Energy" of the new Open Access journal "Physics of the Dark Universe". Replaced with accepted versio