47,586 research outputs found
Building scalable digital library ingestion pipelines using microservices
CORE, a harvesting service offering access to millions of open access research papers from around the world, has shifted its harvesting process from following a monolithic approach to the adoption of a microservices infrastructure. In this paper, we explain how we rearranged and re-scheduled our old ingestion pipeline, present CORE's move to managing microservices and outline the tools we use in a new and optimised ingestion system. In addition, we discuss the ineffciencies of our old harvesting process, the advantages, and challenges of our new ingestion system and our future plans. We conclude that via the adoption of microservices architecture we managed to achieve a scalable and distributed system that would assist with CORE's future performance
and evolution
A Scalable Correlator Architecture Based on Modular FPGA Hardware, Reuseable Gateware, and Data Packetization
A new generation of radio telescopes is achieving unprecedented levels of
sensitivity and resolution, as well as increased agility and field-of-view, by
employing high-performance digital signal processing hardware to phase and
correlate large numbers of antennas. The computational demands of these imaging
systems scale in proportion to BMN^2, where B is the signal bandwidth, M is the
number of independent beams, and N is the number of antennas. The
specifications of many new arrays lead to demands in excess of tens of PetaOps
per second.
To meet this challenge, we have developed a general purpose correlator
architecture using standard 10-Gbit Ethernet switches to pass data between
flexible hardware modules containing Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)
chips. These chips are programmed using open-source signal processing libraries
we have developed to be flexible, scalable, and chip-independent. This work
reduces the time and cost of implementing a wide range of signal processing
systems, with correlators foremost among them,and facilitates upgrading to new
generations of processing technology. We present several correlator
deployments, including a 16-antenna, 200-MHz bandwidth, 4-bit, full Stokes
parameter application deployed on the Precision Array for Probing the Epoch of
Reionization.Comment: Accepted to Publications of the Astronomy Society of the Pacific. 31
pages. v2: corrected typo, v3: corrected Fig. 1
Scalable Interactive Volume Rendering Using Off-the-shelf Components
This paper describes an application of a second generation implementation of the Sepia architecture (Sepia-2) to interactive volu-metric visualization of large rectilinear scalar fields. By employingpipelined associative blending operators in a sort-last configuration a demonstration system with 8 rendering computers sustains 24 to 28 frames per second while interactively rendering large data volumes (1024x256x256 voxels, and 512x512x512 voxels). We believe interactive performance at these frame rates and data sizes is unprecedented. We also believe these results can be extended to other types of structured and unstructured grids and a variety of GL rendering techniques including surface rendering and shadow map-ping. We show how to extend our single-stage crossbar demonstration system to multi-stage networks in order to support much larger data sizes and higher image resolutions. This requires solving a dynamic mapping problem for a class of blending operators that includes Porter-Duff compositing operators
An efficient hardware architecture for a neural network activation function generator
This paper proposes an efficient hardware architecture for a function generator suitable for an artificial neural network (ANN). A spline-based approximation function is designed that provides a good trade-off between accuracy and silicon area, whilst also being inherently scalable and adaptable for numerous activation functions. This has been achieved by using a minimax polynomial and through optimal placement of the approximating polynomials based on the results of a genetic algorithm. The approximation error of the proposed method compares favourably to all related research in this field. Efficient hardware multiplication circuitry is used in the implementation, which reduces the area overhead and increases the throughput
Benchmarking SciDB Data Import on HPC Systems
SciDB is a scalable, computational database management system that uses an
array model for data storage. The array data model of SciDB makes it ideally
suited for storing and managing large amounts of imaging data. SciDB is
designed to support advanced analytics in database, thus reducing the need for
extracting data for analysis. It is designed to be massively parallel and can
run on commodity hardware in a high performance computing (HPC) environment. In
this paper, we present the performance of SciDB using simulated image data. The
Dynamic Distributed Dimensional Data Model (D4M) software is used to implement
the benchmark on a cluster running the MIT SuperCloud software stack. A peak
performance of 2.2M database inserts per second was achieved on a single node
of this system. We also show that SciDB and the D4M toolbox provide more
efficient ways to access random sub-volumes of massive datasets compared to the
traditional approaches of reading volumetric data from individual files. This
work describes the D4M and SciDB tools we developed and presents the initial
performance results. This performance was achieved by using parallel inserts, a
in-database merging of arrays as well as supercomputing techniques, such as
distributed arrays and single-program-multiple-data programming.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, IEEE High Performance Extreme Computing (HPEC)
2016, best paper finalis
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