9,662 research outputs found
Survey and Analysis of Production Distributed Computing Infrastructures
This report has two objectives. First, we describe a set of the production
distributed infrastructures currently available, so that the reader has a basic
understanding of them. This includes explaining why each infrastructure was
created and made available and how it has succeeded and failed. The set is not
complete, but we believe it is representative.
Second, we describe the infrastructures in terms of their use, which is a
combination of how they were designed to be used and how users have found ways
to use them. Applications are often designed and created with specific
infrastructures in mind, with both an appreciation of the existing capabilities
provided by those infrastructures and an anticipation of their future
capabilities. Here, the infrastructures we discuss were often designed and
created with specific applications in mind, or at least specific types of
applications. The reader should understand how the interplay between the
infrastructure providers and the users leads to such usages, which we call
usage modalities. These usage modalities are really abstractions that exist
between the infrastructures and the applications; they influence the
infrastructures by representing the applications, and they influence the ap-
plications by representing the infrastructures
MOLNs: A cloud platform for interactive, reproducible and scalable spatial stochastic computational experiments in systems biology using PyURDME
Computational experiments using spatial stochastic simulations have led to
important new biological insights, but they require specialized tools, a
complex software stack, as well as large and scalable compute and data analysis
resources due to the large computational cost associated with Monte Carlo
computational workflows. The complexity of setting up and managing a
large-scale distributed computation environment to support productive and
reproducible modeling can be prohibitive for practitioners in systems biology.
This results in a barrier to the adoption of spatial stochastic simulation
tools, effectively limiting the type of biological questions addressed by
quantitative modeling. In this paper, we present PyURDME, a new, user-friendly
spatial modeling and simulation package, and MOLNs, a cloud computing appliance
for distributed simulation of stochastic reaction-diffusion models. MOLNs is
based on IPython and provides an interactive programming platform for
development of sharable and reproducible distributed parallel computational
experiments
funcX: A Federated Function Serving Fabric for Science
Exploding data volumes and velocities, new computational methods and
platforms, and ubiquitous connectivity demand new approaches to computation in
the sciences. These new approaches must enable computation to be mobile, so
that, for example, it can occur near data, be triggered by events (e.g.,
arrival of new data), be offloaded to specialized accelerators, or run remotely
where resources are available. They also require new design approaches in which
monolithic applications can be decomposed into smaller components, that may in
turn be executed separately and on the most suitable resources. To address
these needs we present funcX---a distributed function as a service (FaaS)
platform that enables flexible, scalable, and high performance remote function
execution. funcX's endpoint software can transform existing clouds, clusters,
and supercomputers into function serving systems, while funcX's cloud-hosted
service provides transparent, secure, and reliable function execution across a
federated ecosystem of endpoints. We motivate the need for funcX with several
scientific case studies, present our prototype design and implementation, show
optimizations that deliver throughput in excess of 1 million functions per
second, and demonstrate, via experiments on two supercomputers, that funcX can
scale to more than more than 130000 concurrent workers.Comment: Accepted to ACM Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and
Distributed Computing (HPDC 2020). arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap
with arXiv:1908.0490
On Evaluating Commercial Cloud Services: A Systematic Review
Background: Cloud Computing is increasingly booming in industry with many
competing providers and services. Accordingly, evaluation of commercial Cloud
services is necessary. However, the existing evaluation studies are relatively
chaotic. There exists tremendous confusion and gap between practices and theory
about Cloud services evaluation. Aim: To facilitate relieving the
aforementioned chaos, this work aims to synthesize the existing evaluation
implementations to outline the state-of-the-practice and also identify research
opportunities in Cloud services evaluation. Method: Based on a conceptual
evaluation model comprising six steps, the Systematic Literature Review (SLR)
method was employed to collect relevant evidence to investigate the Cloud
services evaluation step by step. Results: This SLR identified 82 relevant
evaluation studies. The overall data collected from these studies essentially
represent the current practical landscape of implementing Cloud services
evaluation, and in turn can be reused to facilitate future evaluation work.
Conclusions: Evaluation of commercial Cloud services has become a world-wide
research topic. Some of the findings of this SLR identify several research gaps
in the area of Cloud services evaluation (e.g., the Elasticity and Security
evaluation of commercial Cloud services could be a long-term challenge), while
some other findings suggest the trend of applying commercial Cloud services
(e.g., compared with PaaS, IaaS seems more suitable for customers and is
particularly important in industry). This SLR study itself also confirms some
previous experiences and reveals new Evidence-Based Software Engineering (EBSE)
lessons
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