1,714 research outputs found
Towards Loosely-Coupled Programming on Petascale Systems
We have extended the Falkon lightweight task execution framework to make
loosely coupled programming on petascale systems a practical and useful
programming model. This work studies and measures the performance factors
involved in applying this approach to enable the use of petascale systems by a
broader user community, and with greater ease. Our work enables the execution
of highly parallel computations composed of loosely coupled serial jobs with no
modifications to the respective applications. This approach allows a new-and
potentially far larger-class of applications to leverage petascale systems,
such as the IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer. We present the challenges of I/O
performance encountered in making this model practical, and show results using
both microbenchmarks and real applications from two domains: economic energy
modeling and molecular dynamics. Our benchmarks show that we can scale up to
160K processor-cores with high efficiency, and can achieve sustained execution
rates of thousands of tasks per second.Comment: IEEE/ACM International Conference for High Performance Computing,
Networking, Storage and Analysis (SuperComputing/SC) 200
Digital libraries on an iPod: Beyond the client-server model
This paper describes an experimental system that enhanced an iPod with digital library capabilities. Using the open source digital library software Greenstone as a base, this paper more specifically maps out the technical steps necessary to achieve this, along with an account of our subsequent experimentation. This included command-line usage of Greenstone's basic runtime system on the device, augmenting the iPodâs main interactive menu-driven application to include searching and hierarchical browsing of digital library collections stored locally, and a selection of "launcher" applications for target documents such as text files, images and audio. Media rich applications for digital stories and collaging were also developed. We also configured the iPod to run as a web server to provide digital library content to others over a network, effectively turning the traditional mobile client-server upsidedown
A secure cloud with minimal provider trust
Bolted is a new architecture for a bare metal cloud with the goal of providing security-sensitive customers of a cloud the same level of security and control that they can obtain in their own private data centers. It allows tenants to elastically allocate secure resources within a cloud while being protected from other previous, current, and future tenants of the cloud. The provisioning of a new server to a tenant isolates a bare metal server, only allowing it to communicate with other tenant's servers once its critical firmware and software have been attested to the tenant. Tenants, rather than the provider, control the tradeoffs between security, price, and performance. A prototype demonstrates scalable end-to-end security with small overhead compared to a less secure alternative.Published versio
Benchmarking, Analysis, and Optimization of Serverless Function Snapshots
Serverless computing has seen rapid adoption due to its high scalability and
flexible, pay-as-you-go billing model. In serverless, developers structure
their services as a collection of functions, sporadically invoked by various
events like clicks. High inter-arrival time variability of function invocations
motivates the providers to start new function instances upon each invocation,
leading to significant cold-start delays that degrade user experience. To
reduce cold-start latency, the industry has turned to snapshotting, whereby an
image of a fully-booted function is stored on disk, enabling a faster
invocation compared to booting a function from scratch.
This work introduces vHive, an open-source framework for serverless
experimentation with the goal of enabling researchers to study and innovate
across the entire serverless stack. Using vHive, we characterize a
state-of-the-art snapshot-based serverless infrastructure, based on
industry-leading Containerd orchestration framework and Firecracker hypervisor
technologies. We find that the execution time of a function started from a
snapshot is 95% higher, on average, than when the same function is
memory-resident. We show that the high latency is attributable to frequent page
faults as the function's state is brought from disk into guest memory one page
at a time. Our analysis further reveals that functions access the same stable
working set of pages across different invocations of the same function. By
leveraging this insight, we build REAP, a light-weight software mechanism for
serverless hosts that records functions' stable working set of guest memory
pages and proactively prefetches it from disk into memory. Compared to baseline
snapshotting, REAP slashes the cold-start delays by 3.7x, on average.Comment: To appear in ASPLOS 202
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