A Tale of Two Data-Intensive Paradigms: Applications, Abstractions, and Architectures

Scientific problems that depend on processing large amounts of data require overcoming challenges in multiple areas: managing large-scale data distribution, co-placement and scheduling of data with compute resources, and storing and transferring large volumes of data. We analyze the ecosystems of the two prominent paradigms for data-intensive applications, hereafter referred to as the high-performance computing and the Apache-Hadoop paradigm. We propose a basis, common terminology and functional factors upon which to analyze the two approaches of both paradigms. We discuss the concept of "Big Data Ogres" and their facets as means of understanding and characterizing the most common application workloads found across the two paradigms. We then discuss the salient features of the two paradigms, and compare and contrast the two approaches. Specifically, we examine common implementation/approaches of these paradigms, shed light upon the reasons for their current "architecture" and discuss some typical workloads that utilize them. In spite of the significant software distinctions, we believe there is architectural similarity. We discuss the potential integration of different implementations, across the different levels and components. Our comparison progresses from a fully qualitative examination of the two paradigms, to a semi-quantitative methodology. We use a simple and broadly used Ogre (K-means clustering), characterize its performance on a range of representative platforms, covering several implementations from both paradigms. Our experiments provide an insight into the relative strengths of the two paradigms. We propose that the set of Ogres will serve as a benchmark to evaluate the two paradigms along different dimensions.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figure

Efficient Parallel and Distributed Algorithms for GIS Polygon Overlay Processing

Polygon clipping is one of the complex operations in computational geometry. It is used in Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Computer Graphics, and VLSI CAD. For two polygons with n and m vertices, the number of intersections can be O(nm). In this dissertation, we present the first output-sensitive CREW PRAM algorithm, which can perform polygon clipping in O(log n) time using O(n + k + k\u27) processors, where n is the number of vertices, k is the number of intersections, and k\u27 is the additional temporary vertices introduced due to the partitioning of polygons. The current best algorithm by Karinthi, Srinivas, and Almasi does not handle self-intersecting polygons, is not output-sensitive and must employ O(n^2) processors to achieve O(log n) time. The second parallel algorithm is an output-sensitive PRAM algorithm based on Greiner-Hormann algorithm with O(log n) time complexity using O(n + k) processors. This is cost-optimal when compared to the time complexity of the best-known sequential plane-sweep based algorithm for polygon clipping. For self-intersecting polygons, the time complexity is O(((n + k) log n log log n)/p) using p In addition to these parallel algorithms, the other main contributions in this dissertation are 1) multi-core and many-core implementation for clipping a pair of polygons and 2) MPI-GIS and Hadoop Topology Suite for distributed polygon overlay using a cluster of nodes. Nvidia GPU and CUDA are used for the many-core implementation. The MPI based system achieves 44X speedup while processing about 600K polygons in two real-world GIS shapefiles 1) USA Detailed Water Bodies and 2) USA Block Group Boundaries) within 20 seconds on a 32-node (8 cores each) IBM iDataPlex cluster interconnected by InfiniBand technology

Scientific High Performance Computing (HPC) Applications On The Azure Cloud Platform

Cloud computing is emerging as a promising platform for compute and data intensive scientific applications. Thanks to the on-demand elastic provisioning capabilities, cloud computing has instigated curiosity among researchers from a wide range of disciplines. However, even though many vendors have rolled out their commercial cloud infrastructures, the service offerings are usually only best-effort based without any performance guarantees. Utilization of these resources will be questionable if it can not meet the performance expectations of deployed applications. Additionally, the lack of the familiar development tools hamper the productivity of eScience developers to write robust scientific high performance computing (HPC) applications. There are no standard frameworks that are currently supported by any large set of vendors offering cloud computing services. Consequently, the application portability among different cloud platforms for scientific applications is hard. Among all clouds, the emerging Azure cloud from Microsoft in particular remains a challenge for HPC program development both due to lack of its support for traditional parallel programming support such as Message Passing Interface (MPI) and map-reduce and due to its evolving application programming interfaces (APIs). We have designed newer frameworks and runtime environments to help HPC application developers by providing them with easy to use tools similar to those known from traditional parallel and distributed computing environment set- ting, such as MPI, for scientific application development on the Azure cloud platform. It is challenging to create an efficient framework for any cloud platform, including the Windows Azure platform, as they are mostly offered to users as a black-box with a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) to access various service components. The primary contributions of this Ph.D. thesis are (i) creating a generic framework for bag-of-tasks HPC applications to serve as the basic building block for application development on the Azure cloud platform, (ii) creating a set of APIs for HPC application development over the Azure cloud platform, which is similar to message passing interface (MPI) from traditional parallel and distributed setting, and (iii) implementing Crayons using the proposed APIs as the first end-to-end parallel scientific application to parallelize the fundamental GIS operations

A Taxonomy of Workflow Management Systems for Grid Computing

With the advent of Grid and application technologies, scientists and engineers are building more and more complex applications to manage and process large data sets, and execute scientific experiments on distributed resources. Such application scenarios require means for composing and executing complex workflows. Therefore, many efforts have been made towards the development of workflow management systems for Grid computing. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy that characterizes and classifies various approaches for building and executing workflows on Grids. We also survey several representative Grid workflow systems developed by various projects world-wide to demonstrate the comprehensiveness of the taxonomy. The taxonomy not only highlights the design and engineering similarities and differences of state-of-the-art in Grid workflow systems, but also identifies the areas that need further research.Comment: 29 pages, 15 figure

The Digital Puglia Project: An Active Digital Library of Remote Sensing Data

The growing need of software infrastructure able to create, maintain and ease the evolution of scientific data, promotes the development of digital libraries in order to provide the user with fast and reliable access to data. In a world that is rapidly changing, the standard view of a digital library as a data repository specialized to a community of users and provided with some search tools is no longer tenable. To be effective, a digital library should be an active digital library, meaning that users can process available data not just to retrieve a particular piece of information, but to infer new knowledge about the data at hand. Digital Puglia is a new project, conceived to emphasize not only retrieval of data to the client's workstation, but also customized processing of the data. Such processing tasks may include data mining, filtering and knowledge discovery in huge databases, compute-intensive image processing (such as principal component analysis, supervised classification, or pattern matching) and on demand computing sessions. We describe the issues, the requirements and the underlying technologies of the Digital Puglia Project, whose final goal is to build a high performance distributed and active digital library of remote sensing data

Remote sensing big data computing: challenges and opportunities

As we have entered an era of high resolution earth observation, the RS data are undergoing an explosive growth. The proliferation of data also give rise to the increasing complexity of RS data, like the diversity and higher dimensionality characteristic of the data. RS data are regarded as RS ‘‘Big Data’’. Fortunately, we are witness the coming technological leapfrogging. In this paper, we give a brief overview on the Big Data and data-intensive problems, including the analysis of RS Big Data, Big Data challenges, current techniques and works for processing RS Big Data

A review of parallel computing for large-scale remote sensing image mosaicking

Interest in image mosaicking has been spurred by a wide variety of research and management needs. However, for large-scale applications, remote sensing image mosaicking usually requires significant computational capabilities. Several studies have attempted to apply parallel computing to improve image mosaicking algorithms and to speed up calculation process. The state of the art of this field has not yet been summarized, which is, however, essential for a better understanding and for further research of image mosaicking parallelism on a large scale. This paper provides a perspective on the current state of image mosaicking parallelization for large scale applications. We firstly introduce the motivation of image mosaicking parallel for large scale application, and analyze the difficulty and problem of parallel image mosaicking at large scale such as scheduling with huge number of dependent tasks, programming with multiple-step procedure, dealing with frequent I/O operation. Then we summarize the existing studies of parallel computing in image mosaicking for large scale applications with respect to problem decomposition and parallel strategy, parallel architecture, task schedule strategy and implementation of image mosaicking parallelization. Finally, the key problems and future potential research directions for image mosaicking are addressed