A UML Profile for the Design, Quality Assessment and Deployment of Data-intensive Applications

Big Data or Data-Intensive applications (DIAs) seek to mine, manipulate, extract or otherwise exploit the potential intelligence hidden behind Big Data. However, several practitioner surveys remark that DIAs potential is still untapped because of very difficult and costly design, quality assessment and continuous refinement. To address the above shortcoming, we propose the use of a UML domain-specific modeling language or profile specifically tailored to support the design, assessment and continuous deployment of DIAs. This article illustrates our DIA-specific profile and outlines its usage in the context of DIA performance engineering and deployment. For DIA performance engineering, we rely on the Apache Hadoop technology, while for DIA deployment, we leverage the TOSCA language. We conclude that the proposed profile offers a powerful language for data-intensive software and systems modeling, quality evaluation and automated deployment of DIAs on private or public clouds

Loghub: A Large Collection of System Log Datasets towards Automated Log Analytics

Logs have been widely adopted in software system development and maintenance because of the rich system runtime information they contain. In recent years, the increase of software size and complexity leads to the rapid growth of the volume of logs. To handle these large volumes of logs efficiently and effectively, a line of research focuses on intelligent log analytics powered by AI (artificial intelligence) techniques. However, only a small fraction of these techniques have reached successful deployment in industry because of the lack of public log datasets and necessary benchmarking upon them. To fill this significant gap between academia and industry and also facilitate more research on AI-powered log analytics, we have collected and organized loghub, a large collection of log datasets. In particular, loghub provides 17 real-world log datasets collected from a wide range of systems, including distributed systems, supercomputers, operating systems, mobile systems, server applications, and standalone software. In this paper, we summarize the statistics of these datasets, introduce some practical log usage scenarios, and present a case study on anomaly detection to demonstrate how loghub facilitates the research and practice in this field. Up to the time of this paper writing, loghub datasets have been downloaded over 15,000 times by more than 380 organizations from both industry and academia.Comment: Dateset available at https://zenodo.org/record/322717

Going Big: A Large-Scale Study on What Big Data Developers Ask

Software developers are increasingly required to write big data code. However, they find big data software development challenging. To help these developers it is necessary to understand big data topics that they are interested in and the difficulty of finding answers for questions in these topics. In this work, we conduct a large-scale study on Stackoverflow to understand the interest and difficulties of big data developers. To conduct the study, we develop a set of big data tags to extract big data posts from Stackoverflow; use topic modeling to group these posts into big data topics; group similar topics into categories to construct a topic hierarchy; analyze popularity and difficulty of topics and their correlations; and discuss implications of our findings for practice, research and education of big data software development and investigate their coincidence with the findings of previous work

Performance modelling and optimization for video-analytic algorithms in a cloud-like environment using machine learning

CCTV cameras produce a large amount of video surveillance data per day, and analysing them require the use of significant computing resources that often need to be scalable. The emergence of the Hadoop distributed processing framework has had a significant impact on various data intensive applications as the distributed computed based processing enables an increase of the processing capability of applications it serves. Hadoop is an open source implementation of the MapReduce programming model. It automates the operation of creating tasks for each function, distribute data, parallelize executions and handles machine failures that reliefs users from the complexity of having to manage the underlying processing and only focus on building their application. It is noted that in a practical deployment the challenge of Hadoop based architecture is that it requires several scalable machines for effective processing, which in turn adds hardware investment cost to the infrastructure. Although using a cloud infrastructure offers scalable and elastic utilization of resources where users can scale up or scale down the number of Virtual Machines (VM) upon requirements, a user such as a CCTV system operator intending to use a public cloud would aspire to know what cloud resources (i.e. number of VMs) need to be deployed so that the processing can be done in the fastest (or within a known time constraint) and the most cost effective manner. Often such resources will also have to satisfy practical, procedural and legal requirements. The capability to model a distributed processing architecture where the resource requirements can be effectively and optimally predicted will thus be a useful tool, if available. In literature there is no clear and comprehensive modelling framework that provides proactive resource allocation mechanisms to satisfy a user's target requirements, especially for a processing intensive application such as video analytic. In this thesis, with the hope of closing the above research gap, novel research is first initiated by understanding the current legal practices and requirements of implementing video surveillance system within a distributed processing and data storage environment, since the legal validity of data gathered or processed within such a system is vital for a distributed system's applicability in such domains. Subsequently the thesis presents a comprehensive framework for the performance ii modelling and optimization of resource allocation in deploying a scalable distributed video analytic application in a Hadoop based framework, running on virtualized cluster of machines. The proposed modelling framework investigates the use of several machine learning algorithms such as, decision trees (M5P, RepTree), Linear Regression, Multi Layer Perceptron(MLP) and the Ensemble Classifier Bagging model, to model and predict the execution time of video analytic jobs, based on infrastructure level as well as job level parameters. Further in order to propose a novel framework for the allocate resources under constraints to obtain optimal performance in terms of job execution time, we propose a Genetic Algorithms (GAs) based optimization technique. Experimental results are provided to demonstrate the proposed framework's capability to successfully predict the job execution time of a given video analytic task based on infrastructure and input data related parameters and its ability determine the minimum job execution time, given constraints of these parameters. Given the above, the thesis contributes to the state-of-art in distributed video analytics, design, implementation, performance analysis and optimisation

Join query enhancement processing (jqpro) with big rdf data on a distributed system using hashing-merge join technique

Semantic web technologies have emerged in the last few years across different fields of study and their data are still growing rapidly. Specifically, the increased data storage and publishing capabilities in standard open web formats have made the technology much more successful. So, the data have become readable by humans, and they can be processed on a computer. The demand for complex multiple RDF queries is becoming significant with the increasing number of RDF triples. Such complex queries occasionally produce many common subexpressions. It is therefore extremely challenging to reduce the amount of RDF queries and transmission time for a vast number of related RDF data. Moreover, Recent literature shows that join query processing of Big RDF data has introduced many problems with respect to execution time and throughput. The hash-based encoding induces low execution time, which takes a long time to load and hence does not load all graphs. This is because the Resource Description Framework (RDF) collects and analyses large data in swarms, thereby having to deal with the inherent challenge of efficient swarm storage. The effective storage and data retrieval, which could be applied to high amounts of possible schema-less data, has also proven exceedingly difficult for RDF data storage. For instance, it is particularly difficult to view semantic and SPARQL query languages, as well as huge and complex graph patterns. To address this problem, a Join Query Processing Model (JQPro) is introduced for Big RDF data. The objectives of this research are: (i) formulate plan generator algorithms for join query processing on the basis of the previous research. (ii) develop an enhancement model of Join Query Processing (JQPro) based on SPARQL and Hadoop MapReduce using hashing-merge join technique to process Big RDF Data. (iii) evaluate and compare the performance based on the execution time, throughput, and CPU utilization of the JQPro model with existing models. On the other hand, the throughput was employed to measure the units of information that a system can process in each time frame. In addition, the CPU utilization was used in the big join query processing as an important resource element particularly during the map, to reduce phases. Furthermore, the hash-join and Sort-Merge algorithms were used to generate the join query processing, and this was employed due to their capacity to allow for more data sets to be joined. Both processes were sorted by algorithms on join attributes and the sorted relations was merged. Therefore, the join column sorted the groups of datasets with the same value. The sort–merge–join algorithm sorts the datasets on the joining attribute and then searches for tuples by merging the two datasets. Then, a processing framework for RDF queries was introduced and the benchmark was used for performance evaluation. Finally, the validation was conducted by standard statistical analysis to validate and compare the performance of the JQPro model with current models. In addition, the synthetic benchmarks Lehigh University Benchmark (LUBM) and Waterloo SPARQL Diversity Test Suite (WatDiv) v06 were used for measurement. The experiment was carried out on three datasets ranging from 10 million to 1 billion RDF triples produced by the generator of WatDiv data with a scale factor of 10, 100 and 1000, respectively. A selective dataset for each experimental query was also used for the processing of RDFs with a LUBM benchmark in sizes 500, 1000 and 2000 million triples. The result revealed that there is a strong correlation between execution time and throughput with a strength of 99.9% percent as confirmed by the Pearson correlation coefficient. Furthermore, the findings show that the JQPro solution was comparable to gStore RDF-3X, RDFox and PARJ and the percentage of improved performance was 87.77% in terms of execution time. The CPU utilization was significantly increased by extensive mapping and reduced code computing. It is therefore inferred that the JQPro solution is timely and innovative, as it provides an efficient execution time and CPU utilization where users could perform better queries for Big RDF data processing in a seamless manne