A Pattern Language for High-Performance Computing Resilience

High-performance computing systems (HPC) provide powerful capabilities for modeling, simulation, and data analytics for a broad class of computational problems. They enable extreme performance of the order of quadrillion floating-point arithmetic calculations per second by aggregating the power of millions of compute, memory, networking and storage components. With the rapidly growing scale and complexity of HPC systems for achieving even greater performance, ensuring their reliable operation in the face of system degradations and failures is a critical challenge. System fault events often lead the scientific applications to produce incorrect results, or may even cause their untimely termination. The sheer number of components in modern extreme-scale HPC systems and the complex interactions and dependencies among the hardware and software components, the applications, and the physical environment makes the design of practical solutions that support fault resilience a complex undertaking. To manage this complexity, we developed a methodology for designing HPC resilience solutions using design patterns. We codified the well-known techniques for handling faults, errors and failures that have been devised, applied and improved upon over the past three decades in the form of design patterns. In this paper, we present a pattern language to enable a structured approach to the development of HPC resilience solutions. The pattern language reveals the relations among the resilience patterns and provides the means to explore alternative techniques for handling a specific fault model that may have different efficiency and complexity characteristics. Using the pattern language enables the design and implementation of comprehensive resilience solutions as a set of interconnected resilience patterns that can be instantiated across layers of the system stack.Comment: Proceedings of the 22nd European Conference on Pattern Languages of Program

Next generation software environments : principles, problems, and research directions

The past decade has seen a burgeoning of research and development in software environments. Conferences have been devoted to the topic of practical environments, journal papers produced, and commercial systems sold. Given all the activity, one might expect a great deal of consensus on issues, approaches, and techniques. This is not the case, however. Indeed, the term "environment" is still used in a variety of conflicting ways. Nevertheless substantial progress has been made and we are at least nearing consensus on many critical issues.The purpose of this paper is to characterize environments, describe several important principles that have emerged in the last decade or so, note current open problems, and describe some approaches to these problems, with particular emphasis on the activities of one large-scale research program, the Arcadia project. Consideration is also given to two related topics: empirical evaluation and technology transition. That is, how can environments and their constituents be evaluated, and how can new developments be moved effectively into the production sector

Driven by Compression Progress: A Simple Principle Explains Essential Aspects of Subjective Beauty, Novelty, Surprise, Interestingness, Attention, Curiosity, Creativity, Art, Science, Music, Jokes

I argue that data becomes temporarily interesting by itself to some self-improving, but computationally limited, subjective observer once he learns to predict or compress the data in a better way, thus making it subjectively simpler and more beautiful. Curiosity is the desire to create or discover more non-random, non-arbitrary, regular data that is novel and surprising not in the traditional sense of Boltzmann and Shannon but in the sense that it allows for compression progress because its regularity was not yet known. This drive maximizes interestingness, the first derivative of subjective beauty or compressibility, that is, the steepness of the learning curve. It motivates exploring infants, pure mathematicians, composers, artists, dancers, comedians, yourself, and (since 1990) artificial systems.Comment: 35 pages, 3 figures, based on KES 2008 keynote and ALT 2007 / DS 2007 joint invited lectur

Electoral quotas for women: an international overview

This paper provides an overview of recent global trends in women’s political representation. It describes the different types of gender quotas that have been adopted, and summarises the various arguments for and against their use, as well as key issues and observations about the impact of quotas drawing on recent international research. The paper concludes with an examination of the current status of electoral gender quotas in Australia, and presents a comparative survey of quota systems in Commonwealth countries including Australia (Appendix 3).Executive summary Less than one in five parliamentarians across the world are women. Legal or voluntary electoral gender quotas are used in more than half of the world’s countries as the most effective mechanism for increasing women’s political representation. Electoral quotas have gained international support and have proven to be effective in ‘fast-tracking’ women’s political representation to produce equality of results, not just equality of opportunity. Their introduction has been controversial in some countries, particularly in liberal democracies where critics oppose them on the basis that they discriminate against men and undermine the selection of candidates or parliamentarians on the basis of merit. Gender quota systems differ in type and application. The main systems in use are reserved seats, legal candidate quotas, and voluntary political party quotas. The success of gender quotas is influenced by various factors including the nature of the political system, the type of electoral or voting system, the type of quota system adopted, cultural attitudes towards the role of women in society, and the nature of the parliamentary environment itself. In 2012 the Australian Government committed $320 million to support a 10-year initiative to ‘empower women and to promote gender equality in the Pacific’ region, which has the world’s lowest proportion of women parliamentarians

Shaded Tangles for the Design and Verification of Quantum Programs (Extended Abstract)

We give a scheme for interpreting shaded tangles as quantum programs, with the property that isotopic tangles yield equivalent programs. We analyze many known quantum programs in this way -- including entanglement manipulation and error correction -- and in each case present a fully-topological formal verification, yielding in several cases substantial new insight into how the program works. We also use our methods to identify several new or generalized procedures.Comment: In Proceedings QPL 2017, arXiv:1802.0973