Normalization of Unstructured Log Data into Streams of Structured Event Objects

Monitoring plays a crucial role in the operation of any sizeable distributed IT infrastructure. Whether it is a university network or cloud datacenter, monitoring information is continuously used in a wide spectrum of ways ranging from mission-critical jobs, e.g. accounting or incident handling, to equally important development-related tasks, e.g. debugging or fault-detection. Whilst pursuing a novel vision of new-generation event-driven monitoring systems, we have identified that a particularly rich source of monitoring information, computer logs, is also one of the most problematic in terms of automated processing. Log data are predominantly generated in an ad-hoc manner using a variety of incompatible formats with the most important pieces of information, i.e. log messages, in the form of unstructured strings. This clashes with our long-term goal of designing a system enabling its users to transparently define real-time continuous queries over homogeneous streams of properly defined monitoring event objects with explicitly described structure. Our goal is to bridge this gap by normalizing the poorly structured log data into streams of structured event objects. The combined challenge of this goal is structuring the log data, whilst considering the high velocity with which they are generated in modern IT infrastructures. This paper summarizes the contributions of a dissertation thesis "Normalization of Unstructured Log Data into Streams of Structured Event Objects" dealing with the matter at hand in detail

Low Latency Geo-distributed Data Analytics

Low latency analytics on geographically distributed dat-asets (across datacenters, edge clusters) is an upcoming and increasingly important challenge. The dominant approach of aggregating all the data to a single data-center significantly inflates the timeliness of analytics. At the same time, running queries over geo-distributed inputs using the current intra-DC analytics frameworks also leads to high query response times because these frameworks cannot cope with the relatively low and variable capacity of WAN links. We present Iridium, a system for low latency geo-distri-buted analytics. Iridium achieves low query response times by optimizing placement of both data and tasks of the queries. The joint data and task placement op-timization, however, is intractable. Therefore, Iridium uses an online heuristic to redistribute datasets among the sites prior to queries ’ arrivals, and places the tasks to reduce network bottlenecks during the query’s ex-ecution. Finally, it also contains a knob to budget WAN usage. Evaluation across eight worldwide EC2 re-gions using production queries show that Iridium speeds up queries by 3 × − 19 × and lowers WAN usage by 15% − 64 % compared to existing baselines

ExaMon-X: a Predictive Maintenance Framework for Automatic Monitoring in Industrial IoT Systems

In recent years, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has led to significant steps forward in many industries, thanks to the exploitation of several technologies, ranging from Big Data processing to Artificial Intelligence (AI). Among the various IIoT scenarios, large-scale data centers can reap significant benefits from adopting Big Data analytics and AI-boosted approaches since these technologies can allow effective predictive maintenance. However, most of the off-the-shelf currently available solutions are not ideally suited to the HPC context, e.g., they do not sufficiently take into account the very heterogeneous data sources and the privacy issues which hinder the adoption of the cloud solution, or they do not fully exploit the computing capabilities available in loco in a supercomputing facility. In this paper, we tackle this issue, and we propose an IIoT holistic and vertical framework for predictive maintenance in supercomputers. The framework is based on a big lightweight data monitoring infrastructure, specialized databases suited for heterogeneous data, and a set of high-level AI-based functionalities tailored to HPC actors’ specific needs. We present the deployment and assess the usage of this framework in several in-production HPC systems

When Things Matter: A Data-Centric View of the Internet of Things

With the recent advances in radio-frequency identification (RFID), low-cost wireless sensor devices, and Web technologies, the Internet of Things (IoT) approach has gained momentum in connecting everyday objects to the Internet and facilitating machine-to-human and machine-to-machine communication with the physical world. While IoT offers the capability to connect and integrate both digital and physical entities, enabling a whole new class of applications and services, several significant challenges need to be addressed before these applications and services can be fully realized. A fundamental challenge centers around managing IoT data, typically produced in dynamic and volatile environments, which is not only extremely large in scale and volume, but also noisy, and continuous. This article surveys the main techniques and state-of-the-art research efforts in IoT from data-centric perspectives, including data stream processing, data storage models, complex event processing, and searching in IoT. Open research issues for IoT data management are also discussed

Resource Aware GPU Scheduling in Kubernetes Infrastructure

Nowadays, there is an ever-increasing number of artificial intelligence inference workloads pushed and executed on the cloud. To effectively serve and manage the computational demands, data center operators have provisioned their infrastructures with accelerators. Specifically for GPUs, support for efficient management lacks, as state-of-the-art schedulers and orchestrators, threat GPUs only as typical compute resources ignoring their unique characteristics and application properties. This phenomenon combined with the GPU over-provisioning problem leads to severe resource under-utilization. Even though prior work has addressed this problem by colocating applications into a single accelerator device, its resource agnostic nature does not manage to face the resource under-utilization and quality of service violations especially for latency critical applications. In this paper, we design a resource aware GPU scheduling framework, able to efficiently colocate applications on the same GPU accelerator card. We integrate our solution with Kubernetes, one of the most widely used cloud orchestration frameworks. We show that our scheduler can achieve 58.8% lower end-to-end job execution time 99%-ile, while delivering 52.5% higher GPU memory usage, 105.9% higher GPU utilization percentage on average and 44.4% lower energy consumption on average, compared to the state-of-the-art schedulers, for a variety of ML representative workloads

Designing Scalable Mechanisms for Geo-Distributed Platform Services in the Presence of Client Mobility

Situation-awareness applications require low-latency response and high network bandwidth, hence benefiting from geo-distributed Edge infrastructures. The developers of these applications typically rely on several platform services, such as Kubernetes, Apache Cassandra and Pulsar, for managing their compute and data components across the geo-distributed Edge infrastructure. Situation-awareness applications impose peculiar requirements on the compute and data placement policies of the platform services. Firstly, the processing logic of these applications is closely tied to the physical environment that it is interacting with. Hence, the access pattern to compute and data exhibits strong spatial affinity. Secondly, the network topology of Edge infrastructure is heterogeneous, wherein communication latency forms a significant portion of the end-to-end compute and data access latency. Therefore, the placement of compute and data components has to be cognizant of the spatial affinity and latency requirements of the applications. However, clients of situation-awareness applications, such as vehicles and drones, are typically mobile – making the compute and data access pattern dynamic and complicating the management of data and compute components. Constant changes in the network connectivity and spatial locality of clients due to client mobility results in making the current placement of compute and data components unsuitable for meeting the latency and spatial affinity requirements of the application. Constant client mobility necessitates that client location and latency offered by the platform services be continuously monitored to detect when application requirements are violated and to adapt the compute and data placement. The control and monitoring modules of off-the-shelf platform services do not have the necessary primitives to incorporate spatial affinity and network topology awareness into their compute and data placement policies. The spatial location of clients is not considered as an input for decision- making in their control modules. Furthermore, they do not perform fine-grained end-to-end monitoring of observed latency to detect and adapt to performance degradations due to client mobility. This dissertation presents three mechanisms that inform the compute and data placement policies of platform services, so that application requirements can be met. M1: Dynamic Spatial Context Management for system entities – clients and data and compute components – to ensure spatial affinity requirements are satisfied. M2: Network Proximity Estimation to provide topology-awareness to the data and compute placement policies of platform services. M3: End-to-End Latency Monitoring to enable collection, aggregation and analysis of per-application metrics in a geo-distributed manner to provide end-to-end insights into application performance. The thesis of our work is that the aforementioned mechanisms are fundamental building blocks for the compute and data management policies of platform services, and that by incorporating them, platform services can meet application requirements at the Edge. Furthermore, the proposed mechanisms can be implemented in a way that offers high scalability to handle high levels of client activity. We demonstrate by construction the efficacy and scalability of the proposed mechanisms for building dynamic compute and data orchestration policies by incorporating them in the control and monitoring modules of three different platform services. Specifically, we incorporate these mechanisms into a topic-based publish-subscribe system (ePulsar), an application orchestration platform (OneEdge), and a key-value store (FogStore). We conduct extensive performance evaluation of these enhanced platform services to showcase how the new mechanisms aid in dynamically adapting the compute/data orchestration decisions to satisfy performance requirements of applicationsPh.D