10,666 research outputs found
Commercial-off-the-shelf simulation package interoperability: Issues and futures
Commercial-Off-The-Shelf Simulation Packages (CSPs) are widely used in industry to simulate discrete-event models. Interoperability of CSPs requires the use of distributed simulation techniques. Literature presents us with many examples of achieving CSP interoperability using bespoke solutions. However, for the wider adoption of CSP-based distributed simulation it is essential that, first and foremost, a standard for CSP interoperability be created, and secondly, these standards are adhered to by the CSP vendors. This advanced tutorial is on an emerging standard relating to CSP interoperability. It gives an overview of this standard and presents case studies that implement some of the proposed standards. Furthermore, interoperability is discussed in relation to large and complex models developed using CSPs that require large amount of computing resources. It is hoped that this tutorial will inform the simulation community of the issues associated with CSP interoperability, the importance of these standards and its future
Enabling Adaptive Grid Scheduling and Resource Management
Wider adoption of the Grid concept has led to an increasing amount of federated
computational, storage and visualisation resources being available to scientists and
researchers. Distributed and heterogeneous nature of these resources renders most of the
legacy cluster monitoring and management approaches inappropriate, and poses new
challenges in workflow scheduling on such systems. Effective resource utilisation monitoring
and highly granular yet adaptive measurements are prerequisites for a more efficient Grid
scheduler. We present a suite of measurement applications able to monitor per-process
resource utilisation, and a customisable tool for emulating observed utilisation models. We
also outline our future work on a predictive and probabilistic Grid scheduler. The research is
undertaken as part of UK e-Science EPSRC sponsored project SO-GRM (Self-Organising
Grid Resource Management) in cooperation with BT
Design and Implementation of a Distributed Middleware for Parallel Execution of Legacy Enterprise Applications
A typical enterprise uses a local area network of computers to perform its
business. During the off-working hours, the computational capacities of these
networked computers are underused or unused. In order to utilize this
computational capacity an application has to be recoded to exploit concurrency
inherent in a computation which is clearly not possible for legacy applications
without any source code. This thesis presents the design an implementation of a
distributed middleware which can automatically execute a legacy application on
multiple networked computers by parallelizing it. This middleware runs multiple
copies of the binary executable code in parallel on different hosts in the
network. It wraps up the binary executable code of the legacy application in
order to capture the kernel level data access system calls and perform them
distributively over multiple computers in a safe and conflict free manner. The
middleware also incorporates a dynamic scheduling technique to execute the
target application in minimum time by scavenging the available CPU cycles of
the hosts in the network. This dynamic scheduling also supports the CPU
availability of the hosts to change over time and properly reschedule the
replicas performing the computation to minimize the execution time. A prototype
implementation of this middleware has been developed as a proof of concept of
the design. This implementation has been evaluated with a few typical case
studies and the test results confirm that the middleware works as expected
Global Grids and Software Toolkits: A Study of Four Grid Middleware Technologies
Grid is an infrastructure that involves the integrated and collaborative use
of computers, networks, databases and scientific instruments owned and managed
by multiple organizations. Grid applications often involve large amounts of
data and/or computing resources that require secure resource sharing across
organizational boundaries. This makes Grid application management and
deployment a complex undertaking. Grid middlewares provide users with seamless
computing ability and uniform access to resources in the heterogeneous Grid
environment. Several software toolkits and systems have been developed, most of
which are results of academic research projects, all over the world. This
chapter will focus on four of these middlewares--UNICORE, Globus, Legion and
Gridbus. It also presents our implementation of a resource broker for UNICORE
as this functionality was not supported in it. A comparison of these systems on
the basis of the architecture, implementation model and several other features
is included.Comment: 19 pages, 10 figure
Active Virtual Network Management Prediction: Complexity as a Framework for Prediction, Optimization, and Assurance
Research into active networking has provided the incentive to re-visit what
has traditionally been classified as distinct properties and characteristics of
information transfer such as protocol versus service; at a more fundamental
level this paper considers the blending of computation and communication by
means of complexity. The specific service examined in this paper is network
self-prediction enabled by Active Virtual Network Management Prediction.
Computation/communication is analyzed via Kolmogorov Complexity. The result is
a mechanism to understand and improve the performance of active networking and
Active Virtual Network Management Prediction in particular. The Active Virtual
Network Management Prediction mechanism allows information, in various states
of algorithmic and static form, to be transported in the service of prediction
for network management. The results are generally applicable to algorithmic
transmission of information. Kolmogorov Complexity is used and experimentally
validated as a theory describing the relationship among algorithmic
compression, complexity, and prediction accuracy within an active network.
Finally, the paper concludes with a complexity-based framework for Information
Assurance that attempts to take a holistic view of vulnerability analysis
Montage: a grid portal and software toolkit for science-grade astronomical image mosaicking
Montage is a portable software toolkit for constructing custom, science-grade
mosaics by composing multiple astronomical images. The mosaics constructed by
Montage preserve the astrometry (position) and photometry (intensity) of the
sources in the input images. The mosaic to be constructed is specified by the
user in terms of a set of parameters, including dataset and wavelength to be
used, location and size on the sky, coordinate system and projection, and
spatial sampling rate. Many astronomical datasets are massive, and are stored
in distributed archives that are, in most cases, remote with respect to the
available computational resources. Montage can be run on both single- and
multi-processor computers, including clusters and grids. Standard grid tools
are used to run Montage in the case where the data or computers used to
construct a mosaic are located remotely on the Internet. This paper describes
the architecture, algorithms, and usage of Montage as both a software toolkit
and as a grid portal. Timing results are provided to show how Montage
performance scales with number of processors on a cluster computer. In
addition, we compare the performance of two methods of running Montage in
parallel on a grid.Comment: 16 pages, 11 figure
Improving Memory Hierarchy Utilisation for Stencil Computations on Multicore Machines
Although modern supercomputers are composed of multicore machines, one can
find scientists that still execute their legacy applications which were
developed to monocore cluster where memory hierarchy is dedicated to a sole
core. The main objective of this paper is to propose and evaluate an algorithm
that identify an efficient blocksize to be applied on MPI stencil computations
on multicore machines. Under the light of an extensive experimental analysis,
this work shows the benefits of identifying blocksizes that will dividing data
on the various cores and suggest a methodology that explore the memory
hierarchy available in modern machines
Extensible Component Based Architecture for FLASH, A Massively Parallel, Multiphysics Simulation Code
FLASH is a publicly available high performance application code which has
evolved into a modular, extensible software system from a collection of
unconnected legacy codes. FLASH has been successful because its capabilities
have been driven by the needs of scientific applications, without compromising
maintainability, performance, and usability. In its newest incarnation, FLASH3
consists of inter-operable modules that can be combined to generate different
applications. The FLASH architecture allows arbitrarily many alternative
implementations of its components to co-exist and interchange with each other,
resulting in greater flexibility. Further, a simple and elegant mechanism
exists for customization of code functionality without the need to modify the
core implementation of the source. A built-in unit test framework providing
verifiability, combined with a rigorous software maintenance process, allow the
code to operate simultaneously in the dual mode of production and development.
In this paper we describe the FLASH3 architecture, with emphasis on solutions
to the more challenging conflicts arising from solver complexity, portable
performance requirements, and legacy codes. We also include results from user
surveys conducted in 2005 and 2007, which highlight the success of the code.Comment: 33 pages, 7 figures; revised paper submitted to Parallel Computin
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