funcX: A Federated Function Serving Fabric for Science

Exploding data volumes and velocities, new computational methods and platforms, and ubiquitous connectivity demand new approaches to computation in the sciences. These new approaches must enable computation to be mobile, so that, for example, it can occur near data, be triggered by events (e.g., arrival of new data), be offloaded to specialized accelerators, or run remotely where resources are available. They also require new design approaches in which monolithic applications can be decomposed into smaller components, that may in turn be executed separately and on the most suitable resources. To address these needs we present funcX---a distributed function as a service (FaaS) platform that enables flexible, scalable, and high performance remote function execution. funcX's endpoint software can transform existing clouds, clusters, and supercomputers into function serving systems, while funcX's cloud-hosted service provides transparent, secure, and reliable function execution across a federated ecosystem of endpoints. We motivate the need for funcX with several scientific case studies, present our prototype design and implementation, show optimizations that deliver throughput in excess of 1 million functions per second, and demonstrate, via experiments on two supercomputers, that funcX can scale to more than more than 130000 concurrent workers.Comment: Accepted to ACM Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing (HPDC 2020). arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1908.0490

Multi-community command and control systems in law enforcement: An introductory planning guide

A set of planning guidelines for multi-community command and control systems in law enforcement is presented. Essential characteristics and applications of these systems are outlined. Requirements analysis, system concept design, implementation planning, and performance and cost modeling are described and demonstrated with numerous examples. Program management techniques and joint powers agreements for multicommunity programs are discussed in detail. A description of a typical multi-community computer-aided dispatch system is appended

The Management of Manufacturing-Oriented Informatics Systems Using Efficient and Flexible Architectures

Industry and in particular the manufacturing-oriented sector has always been researched and innovated as a result of technological progress, diversification and differentiation among consumers' demands. A company that provides to its customers products matching perfectly their demands at competitive prices has a great advantage over its competitors. Manufacturing-oriented information systems are becoming more flexible and configurable and they require integration with the entire organization. This can be done using efficient software architectures that will allow the coexistence between commercial solutions and open source components while sharing computing resources organized in grid infrastructures and under the governance of powerful management tools.Manufacturing-Oriented Informatics Systems, Open Source, Software Architectures, Grid Computing, Web-Based Management Systems

MDP: Minimum Delay Hot-spot Parking

Hot-spot parking is becoming the Achilles\u27 heel of the tourism industry. The more tourists that are attracted to the scenic site, the more often they will encounter a hassle of congestion to find a parking place; while those existing facilities for daily traffic are not supposed to support the excessive volume outburst. In this paper, we present a new parking guidance information system (PGI). By taking advantage of the technical advances of today in wireless communication of vehicular ad-hoc network, each vehicle will request and obtain a relatively fair opportunity to park. The competition and the corresponding allocation on the available slots emerging along the time scale are considered, in order to ensure that no vehicle enters a state of starvation. This is the first attempt to solve the spatiotemporal problem of resource assignment based on our extensive work on the Hungarian algorithm. The contribution as one part of the sustainable development of big historic cities is to minimize the idle driving and waiting, without increasing the parking supply, which could be costly and unnecessary to build in those urban areas. Both analytical and experimental results demonstrate the success of our effort, in terms of the average cruising/waiting time in each individual parking case and its upper bound. The data is compared with the best results known to date and shows a new direction to improve the resource assignment