1,857 research outputs found
Pando: Personal Volunteer Computing in Browsers
The large penetration and continued growth in ownership of personal
electronic devices represents a freely available and largely untapped source of
computing power. To leverage those, we present Pando, a new volunteer computing
tool based on a declarative concurrent programming model and implemented using
JavaScript, WebRTC, and WebSockets. This tool enables a dynamically varying
number of failure-prone personal devices contributed by volunteers to
parallelize the application of a function on a stream of values, by using the
devices' browsers. We show that Pando can provide throughput improvements
compared to a single personal device, on a variety of compute-bound
applications including animation rendering and image processing. We also show
the flexibility of our approach by deploying Pando on personal devices
connected over a local network, on Grid5000, a French-wide computing grid in a
virtual private network, and seven PlanetLab nodes distributed in a wide area
network over Europe.Comment: 14 pages, 12 figures, 2 table
Implicit Invocation Meets Safe, Implicit Concurrency
Writing correct and efficient concurrent programs still remains a challenge. Explicit concurrency is difficult, error prone, and creates code which is hard to maintain and debug. This type of concurrency also treats modular program design and concurrency as separate goals, where modularity often suffers. To solve these problems, we are designing a new language that we call Panini. In this work, we focus on Panini\u27s asynchronous, typed events which reconcile the modularity goal promoted by the implicit invocation design style with the concurrency goal of exposing potential concurrency between the execution of subjects and observers. Since modularity is improved and concurrency is implicit in Panini, programs are easier to reason about and maintain. The language incorporates a static analysis to determine potential conflicts between handlers and a dynamic analysis which uses the conflict information to determine a safe order for handler invocation. This mechanism avoids races and deadlocks entirely, yielding programs with a guaranteed deterministic semantics. To evaluate our language design and implementation we show several examples of its usage as well as an empirical study of program performance. We found that not only is developing and understanding programs significantly easier compared to standard concurrent object-oriented programs, but also performance of Panini programs is comparable to their equivalent hand-tuned versions written using Java\u27s fork-join framework
Engineering simulations for cancer systems biology
Computer simulation can be used to inform in vivo and in vitro experimentation, enabling rapid, low-cost hypothesis generation and directing experimental design in order to test those hypotheses. In this way, in silico models become a scientific instrument for investigation, and so should be developed to high standards, be carefully calibrated and their findings presented in such that they may be reproduced. Here, we outline a framework that supports developing simulations as scientific instruments, and we select cancer systems biology as an exemplar domain, with a particular focus on cellular signalling models. We consider the challenges of lack of data, incomplete knowledge and modelling in the context of a rapidly changing knowledge base. Our framework comprises a process to clearly separate scientific and engineering concerns in model and simulation development, and an argumentation approach to documenting models for rigorous way of recording assumptions and knowledge gaps. We propose interactive, dynamic visualisation tools to enable the biological community to interact with cellular signalling models directly for experimental design. There is a mismatch in scale between these cellular models and tissue structures that are affected by tumours, and bridging this gap requires substantial computational resource. We present concurrent programming as a technology to link scales without losing important details through model simplification. We discuss the value of combining this technology, interactive visualisation, argumentation and model separation to support development of multi-scale models that represent biologically plausible cells arranged in biologically plausible structures that model cell behaviour, interactions and response to therapeutic interventions
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
A heuristic-based approach to code-smell detection
Encapsulation and data hiding are central tenets of the object oriented paradigm. Deciding what data and behaviour to form into a class and where to draw the line between its public and private details can make the difference between a class that is an understandable, flexible and reusable abstraction and one which is not. This decision is a difficult one and may easily result in poor encapsulation which can then have serious implications for a number of system qualities. It is often hard to identify such encapsulation problems within large software systems until they cause a maintenance problem (which is usually too late) and attempting to perform such analysis manually can also be tedious and error prone. Two of the common encapsulation problems that can arise as a consequence of this decomposition process are data classes and god classes. Typically, these two problems occur together – data classes are lacking in functionality that has typically been sucked into an over-complicated and domineering god class. This paper describes the architecture of a tool which automatically detects data and god classes that has been developed as a plug-in for the Eclipse IDE. The technique has been evaluated in a controlled study on two large open source systems which compare the tool results to similar work by Marinescu, who employs a metrics-based approach to detecting such features. The study provides some valuable insights into the strengths and weaknesses of the two approache
Parallel Computers and Complex Systems
We present an overview of the state of the art and future trends in high performance parallel and distributed computing, and discuss techniques for using such computers in the simulation of complex problems in computational science. The use of high performance parallel computers can help improve our understanding of complex systems, and the converse is also true --- we can apply techniques used for the study of complex systems to improve our understanding of parallel computing. We consider parallel computing as the mapping of one complex system --- typically a model of the world --- into another complex system --- the parallel computer. We study static, dynamic, spatial and temporal properties of both the complex systems and the map between them. The result is a better understanding of which computer architectures are good for which problems, and of software structure, automatic partitioning of data, and the performance of parallel machines
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