A Taxonomy of Data Grids for Distributed Data Sharing, Management and Processing

Data Grids have been adopted as the platform for scientific communities that need to share, access, transport, process and manage large data collections distributed worldwide. They combine high-end computing technologies with high-performance networking and wide-area storage management techniques. In this paper, we discuss the key concepts behind Data Grids and compare them with other data sharing and distribution paradigms such as content delivery networks, peer-to-peer networks and distributed databases. We then provide comprehensive taxonomies that cover various aspects of architecture, data transportation, data replication and resource allocation and scheduling. Finally, we map the proposed taxonomy to various Data Grid systems not only to validate the taxonomy but also to identify areas for future exploration. Through this taxonomy, we aim to categorise existing systems to better understand their goals and their methodology. This would help evaluate their applicability for solving similar problems. This taxonomy also provides a "gap analysis" of this area through which researchers can potentially identify new issues for investigation. Finally, we hope that the proposed taxonomy and mapping also helps to provide an easy way for new practitioners to understand this complex area of research.Comment: 46 pages, 16 figures, Technical Repor

Improving Distributed Filesystem Performance by Combining Replica and Network Path Selection

Distributed filesystems are often the primary bandwidth consumers of large-scale datacenter networks. Unsurprisingly, the datacenter network is often the performance bottleneck for distributed filesystems. Yet even with this close relationship, current distributed filesystems and networks are designed independently and communicate over narrow interfaces that expose only their basic functionalities. Even network-aware distributed filesystems only make use of rudimentary network information, and are not reciprocally involved in making network decisions that affect filesystem performance. In this thesis, we introduce Mayflower, a new distributed filesystem co-designed with the control plane of its underlying datacenter network. This design approach enables Mayflower to combine both filesystem and network information to make replica selection and dynamic flow scheduling decisions. By having more information and controlling both the filesystem and the network, Mayflower can perform optimizations that are unavailable to conventional distributed filesystems and network control planes. Our evaluation results using a real implementation show that Mayflower reduces average read completion time by more than 60% compared to HDFS with ECMP

Replica Creation Algorithm for Data Grids

Data grid system is a data management infrastructure that facilitates reliable access and sharing of large amount of data, storage resources, and data transfer services that can be scaled across distributed locations. This thesis presents a new replication algorithm that improves data access performance in data grids by distributing relevant data copies around the grid. The new Data Replica Creation Algorithm (DRCM) improves performance of data grid systems by reducing job execution time and making the best use of data grid resources (network bandwidth and storage space). Current algorithms focus on number of accesses in deciding which file to replicate and where to place them, which ignores resources’ capabilities. DRCM differs by considering both user and resource perspectives; strategically placing replicas at locations that provide the lowest transfer cost. The proposed algorithm uses three strategies: Replica Creation and Deletion Strategy (RCDS), Replica Placement Strategy (RPS), and Replica Replacement Strategy (RRS). DRCM was evaluated using network simulation (OptorSim) based on selected performance metrics (mean job execution time, efficient network usage, average storage usage, and computing element usage), scenarios, and topologies. Results revealed better job execution time with lower resource consumption than existing approaches. This research contributes replication strategies embodied in one algorithm that enhances data grid performance, capable of making a decision on creating or deleting more than one file during same decision. Furthermore, dependency-level-between-files criterion was utilized and integrated with the exponential growth/decay model to give an accurate file evaluation

Improvement of Data-Intensive Applications Running on Cloud Computing Clusters

MapReduce, designed by Google, is widely used as the most popular distributed programming model in cloud environments. Hadoop, an open-source implementation of MapReduce, is a data management framework on large cluster of commodity machines to handle data-intensive applications. Many famous enterprises including Facebook, Twitter, and Adobe have been using Hadoop for their data-intensive processing needs. Task stragglers in MapReduce jobs dramatically impede job execution on massive datasets in cloud computing systems. This impedance is due to the uneven distribution of input data and computation load among cluster nodes, heterogeneous data nodes, data skew in reduce phase, resource contention situations, and network configurations. All these reasons may cause delay failure and the violation of job completion time. One of the key issues that can significantly affect the performance of cloud computing is the computation load balancing among cluster nodes. Replica placement in Hadoop distributed file system plays a significant role in data availability and the balanced utilization of clusters. In the current replica placement policy (RPP) of Hadoop distributed file system (HDFS), the replicas of data blocks cannot be evenly distributed across cluster\u27s nodes. The current HDFS must rely on a load balancing utility for balancing the distribution of replicas, which results in extra overhead for time and resources. This dissertation addresses data load balancing problem and presents an innovative replica placement policy for HDFS. It can perfectly balance the data load among cluster\u27s nodes. The heterogeneity of cluster nodes exacerbates the issue of computational load balancing; therefore, another replica placement algorithm has been proposed in this dissertation for heterogeneous cluster environments. The timing of identifying the straggler map task is very important for straggler mitigation in data-intensive cloud computing. To mitigate the straggler map task, Present progress and Feedback based Speculative Execution (PFSE) algorithm has been proposed in this dissertation. PFSE is a new straggler identification scheme to identify the straggler map tasks based on the feedback information received from completed tasks beside the progress of the current running task. Straggler reduce task aggravates the violation of MapReduce job completion time. Straggler reduce task is typically the result of bad data partitioning during the reduce phase. The Hash partitioner employed by Hadoop may cause intermediate data skew, which results in straggler reduce task. In this dissertation a new partitioning scheme, named Balanced Data Clusters Partitioner (BDCP), is proposed to mitigate straggler reduce tasks. BDCP is based on sampling of input data and feedback information about the current processing task. BDCP can assist in straggler mitigation during the reduce phase and minimize the job completion time in MapReduce jobs. The results of extensive experiments corroborate that the algorithms and policies proposed in this dissertation can improve the performance of data-intensive applications running on cloud platforms

Data Replication and Its Alignment with Fault Management in the Cloud Environment

Nowadays, the exponential data growth becomes one of the major challenges all over the world. It may cause a series of negative impacts such as network overloading, high system complexity, and inadequate data security, etc. Cloud computing is developed to construct a novel paradigm to alleviate massive data processing challenges with its on-demand services and distributed architecture. Data replication has been proposed to strategically distribute the data access load to multiple cloud data centres by creating multiple data copies at multiple cloud data centres. A replica-applied cloud environment not only achieves a decrease in response time, an increase in data availability, and more balanced resource load but also protects the cloud environment against the upcoming faults. The reactive fault tolerance strategy is also required to handle the faults when the faults already occurred. As a result, the data replication strategies should be aligned with the reactive fault tolerance strategies to achieve a complete management chain in the cloud environment. In this thesis, a data replication and fault management framework is proposed to establish a decentralised overarching management to the cloud environment. Three data replication strategies are firstly proposed based on this framework. A replica creation strategy is proposed to reduce the total cost by jointly considering the data dependency and the access frequency in the replica creation decision making process. Besides, a cloud map oriented and cost efficiency driven replica creation strategy is proposed to achieve the optimal cost reduction per replica in the cloud environment. The local data relationship and the remote data relationship are further analysed by creating two novel data dependency types, Within-DataCentre Data Dependency and Between-DataCentre Data Dependency, according to the data location. Furthermore, a network performance based replica selection strategy is proposed to avoid potential network overloading problems and to increase the number of concurrent-running instances at the same time

Architecting Data Centers for High Efficiency and Low Latency

Modern data centers, housing remarkably powerful computational capacity, are built in massive scales and consume a huge amount of energy. The energy consumption of data centers has mushroomed from virtually nothing to about three percent of the global electricity supply in the last decade, and will continuously grow. Unfortunately, a significant fraction of this energy consumption is wasted due to the inefficiency of current data center architectures, and one of the key reasons behind this inefficiency is the stringent response latency requirements of the user-facing services hosted in these data centers such as web search and social networks. To deliver such low response latency, data center operators often have to overprovision resources to handle high peaks in user load and unexpected load spikes, resulting in low efficiency. This dissertation investigates data center architecture designs that reconcile high system efficiency and low response latency. To increase the efficiency, we propose techniques that understand both microarchitectural-level resource sharing and system-level resource usage dynamics to enable highly efficient co-locations of latency-critical services and low-priority batch workloads. We investigate the resource sharing on real-system simultaneous multithreading (SMT) processors to enable SMT co-locations by precisely predicting the performance interference. We then leverage historical resource usage patterns to further optimize the task scheduling algorithm and data placement policy to improve the efficiency of workload co-locations. Moreover, we introduce methodologies to better manage the response latency by automatically attributing the source of tail latency to low-level architectural and system configurations in both offline load testing environment and online production environment. We design and develop a response latency evaluation framework at microsecond-level precision for data center applications, with which we construct statistical inference procedures to attribute the source of tail latency. Finally, we present an approach that proactively enacts carefully designed causal inference micro-experiments to diagnose the root causes of response latency anomalies, and automatically correct them to reduce the response latency.PHDComputer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/144144/1/yunqi_1.pd

Replication for Web Hosting Systems

Replication is a well-known technique to improve the accessibility of Web sites. It generally offers reduced client latencies and increases a site’s availability. However, applying replication techniques is not trivial, and various Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) have been created to facilitate replication for digital content providers. Th

Geo-Distance Based 2- Replica Maintaining Algorithm for Ensuring the Reliability forever Even During the Natural Disaster on Cloud Storage System

In today's digitalized and globalized scenario, everyone has moved to cloud computing for storing their information on cloud storage to access their data from anywhere at any time. The most significant feature of cloud storage is its high availability and reliability then it has the capability of reducing management factors as well as incurred lower storage cost compared with some other storing methods, it is most suitable for a high volume of data storage. In order to meet the requirements of high availability and reliability, the system adopts a replication system concept. In replicating systems, the objects are replicated many times, with each copy residing in a different geographical location. Though it is beneficial to the users, it leads to some issues like security, integrity, consistency and hidden storage and maintenance cost, etc. Therefore, it is exposed to a few threats to the Cloud Storage System (CSS) user and the provider as well. So, this research seeks to explore the mechanisms to rectify the above-mentioned issues. Thus, the predecessor of the research work has proposed an algorithm named as 2-Replica Placing (2RP) algorithm which is used to reduce the storage cost, maintenance cost; and maintenance overheads as well as increase the available storage spaces for the providers by placing the data files on two locations based on Geo-Distance. But it fails to address the recovery mechanism when a natural disaster happens because providing reliability with less than 2 replicas is a challenging task for the providers. Thus, the research proposed Geo-distance based 2-Replica Maintaining (2RM) algorithm which is used to consider that issue for ensuring reliability forever even during natural disaster

A Time-driven Data Placement Strategy for a Scientific Workflow Combining Edge Computing and Cloud Computing

Compared to traditional distributed computing environments such as grids, cloud computing provides a more cost-effective way to deploy scientific workflows. Each task of a scientific workflow requires several large datasets that are located in different datacenters from the cloud computing environment, resulting in serious data transmission delays. Edge computing reduces the data transmission delays and supports the fixed storing manner for scientific workflow private datasets, but there is a bottleneck in its storage capacity. It is a challenge to combine the advantages of both edge computing and cloud computing to rationalize the data placement of scientific workflow, and optimize the data transmission time across different datacenters. Traditional data placement strategies maintain load balancing with a given number of datacenters, which results in a large data transmission time. In this study, a self-adaptive discrete particle swarm optimization algorithm with genetic algorithm operators (GA-DPSO) was proposed to optimize the data transmission time when placing data for a scientific workflow. This approach considered the characteristics of data placement combining edge computing and cloud computing. In addition, it considered the impact factors impacting transmission delay, such as the band-width between datacenters, the number of edge datacenters, and the storage capacity of edge datacenters. The crossover operator and mutation operator of the genetic algorithm were adopted to avoid the premature convergence of the traditional particle swarm optimization algorithm, which enhanced the diversity of population evolution and effectively reduced the data transmission time. The experimental results show that the data placement strategy based on GA-DPSO can effectively reduce the data transmission time during workflow execution combining edge computing and cloud computing