Approaches to Conflict-free Replicated Data Types

Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) allow optimistic replication in a principled way. Different replicas can proceed independently, being available even under network partitions, and always converging deterministically: replicas that have received the same updates will have equivalent state, even if received in different orders. After a historical tour of the evolution from sequential data types to CRDTs, we present in detail the two main approaches to CRDTs, operation-based and state-based, including two important variations, the pure operation-based and the delta-state based. Intended as a tutorial for prospective CRDT researchers and designers, it provides solid coverage of the essential concepts, clarifying some misconceptions which frequently occur, but also presents some novel insights gained from considerable experience in designing both specific CRDTs and approaches to CRDTs.Comment: 36 page

Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems: 14th IFIP WG 6.1 International Conference, DAIS 2014, Held as Part of the 9th International Federated Conference on Distributed Computing Techniques, DisCoTec 2014, Berlin, Germany, June 3-5, 2014, Proceedings

International audienceBook Front Matter of LNCS 846

Políticas de Copyright de Publicações Científicas em Repositórios Institucionais: O Caso do INESC TEC

A progressiva transformação das práticas científicas, impulsionada pelo desenvolvimento das novas Tecnologias de Informação e Comunicação (TIC), têm possibilitado aumentar o acesso à informação, caminhando gradualmente para uma abertura do ciclo de pesquisa. Isto permitirá resolver a longo prazo uma adversidade que se tem colocado aos investigadores, que passa pela existência de barreiras que limitam as condições de acesso, sejam estas geográficas ou financeiras. Apesar da produção científica ser dominada, maioritariamente, por grandes editoras comerciais, estando sujeita às regras por estas impostas, o Movimento do Acesso Aberto cuja primeira declaração pública, a Declaração de Budapeste (BOAI), é de 2002, vem propor alterações significativas que beneficiam os autores e os leitores. Este Movimento vem a ganhar importância em Portugal desde 2003, com a constituição do primeiro repositório institucional a nível nacional. Os repositórios institucionais surgiram como uma ferramenta de divulgação da produção científica de uma instituição, com o intuito de permitir abrir aos resultados da investigação, quer antes da publicação e do próprio processo de arbitragem (preprint), quer depois (postprint), e, consequentemente, aumentar a visibilidade do trabalho desenvolvido por um investigador e a respetiva instituição. O estudo apresentado, que passou por uma análise das políticas de copyright das publicações científicas mais relevantes do INESC TEC, permitiu não só perceber que as editoras adotam cada vez mais políticas que possibilitam o auto-arquivo das publicações em repositórios institucionais, como também que existe todo um trabalho de sensibilização a percorrer, não só para os investigadores, como para a instituição e toda a sociedade. A produção de um conjunto de recomendações, que passam pela implementação de uma política institucional que incentive o auto-arquivo das publicações desenvolvidas no âmbito institucional no repositório, serve como mote para uma maior valorização da produção científica do INESC TEC.The progressive transformation of scientific practices, driven by the development of new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), which made it possible to increase access to information, gradually moving towards an opening of the research cycle. This opening makes it possible to resolve, in the long term, the adversity that has been placed on researchers, which involves the existence of barriers that limit access conditions, whether geographical or financial. Although large commercial publishers predominantly dominate scientific production and subject it to the rules imposed by them, the Open Access movement whose first public declaration, the Budapest Declaration (BOAI), was in 2002, proposes significant changes that benefit the authors and the readers. This Movement has gained importance in Portugal since 2003, with the constitution of the first institutional repository at the national level. Institutional repositories have emerged as a tool for disseminating the scientific production of an institution to open the results of the research, both before publication and the preprint process and postprint, increase the visibility of work done by an investigator and his or her institution. The present study, which underwent an analysis of the copyright policies of INESC TEC most relevant scientific publications, allowed not only to realize that publishers are increasingly adopting policies that make it possible to self-archive publications in institutional repositories, all the work of raising awareness, not only for researchers but also for the institution and the whole society. The production of a set of recommendations, which go through the implementation of an institutional policy that encourages the self-archiving of the publications developed in the institutional scope in the repository, serves as a motto for a greater appreciation of the scientific production of INESC TEC

Towards efficient error detection in large-scale HPC systems

The need for computer systems to be reliable has increasingly become important as the dependence on their accurate functioning by users increases. The failure of these systems could very costly in terms of time and money. In as much as system's designers try to design fault-free systems, it is practically impossible to have such systems as different factors could affect them. In order to achieve system's reliability, fault tolerance methods are usually deployed; these methods help the system to produce acceptable results even in the presence of faults. Root cause analysis, a dependability method for which the causes of failures are diagnosed for the purpose of correction or prevention of future occurrence is less efficient. It is reactive and would not prevent the first failure from occurring. For this reason, methods with predictive capabilities are preferred; failure prediction methods are employed to predict the potential failures to enable preventive measures to be applied. Most of the predictive methods have been supervised, requiring accurate knowledge of the system's failures, errors and faults. However, with changing system components and system updates, supervised methods are ineffective. Error detection methods allows error patterns to be detected early to enable preventive methods to be applied. Performing this detection in an unsupervised way could be more effective as changes to systems or updates would less affect such a solution. In this thesis, we introduced an unsupervised approach to detecting error patterns in a system using its data. More specifically, the thesis investigates the use of both event logs and resource utilization data to detect error patterns. It addresses both the spatial and temporal aspects of achieving system dependability. The proposed unsupervised error detection method has been applied on real data from two different production systems. The results are positive; showing average detection F-measure of about 75%

Enabling Model-Driven Live Analytics For Cyber-Physical Systems: The Case of Smart Grids

Advances in software, embedded computing, sensors, and networking technologies will lead to a new generation of smart cyber-physical systems that will far exceed the capabilities of today’s embedded systems. They will be entrusted with increasingly complex tasks like controlling electric grids or autonomously driving cars. These systems have the potential to lay the foundations for tomorrow’s critical infrastructures, to form the basis of emerging and future smart services, and to improve the quality of our everyday lives in many areas. In order to solve their tasks, they have to continuously monitor and collect data from physical processes, analyse this data, and make decisions based on it. Making smart decisions requires a deep understanding of the environment, internal state, and the impacts of actions. Such deep understanding relies on efficient data models to organise the sensed data and on advanced analytics. Considering that cyber-physical systems are controlling physical processes, decisions need to be taken very fast. This makes it necessary to analyse data in live, as opposed to conventional batch analytics. However, the complex nature combined with the massive amount of data generated by such systems impose fundamental challenges. While data in the context of cyber-physical systems has some similar characteristics as big data, it holds a particular complexity. This complexity results from the complicated physical phenomena described by this data, which makes it difficult to extract a model able to explain such data and its various multi-layered relationships. Existing solutions fail to provide sustainable mechanisms to analyse such data in live. This dissertation presents a novel approach, named model-driven live analytics. The main contribution of this thesis is a multi-dimensional graph data model that brings raw data, domain knowledge, and machine learning together in a single model, which can drive live analytic processes. This model is continuously updated with the sensed data and can be leveraged by live analytic processes to support decision-making of cyber-physical systems. The presented approach has been developed in collaboration with an industrial partner and, in form of a prototype, applied to the domain of smart grids. The addressed challenges are derived from this collaboration as a response to shortcomings in the current state of the art. More specifically, this dissertation provides solutions for the following challenges: First, data handled by cyber-physical systems is usually dynamic—data in motion as opposed to traditional data at rest—and changes frequently and at different paces. Analysing such data is challenging since data models usually can only represent a snapshot of a system at one specific point in time. A common approach consists in a discretisation, which regularly samples and stores such snapshots at specific timestamps to keep track of the history. Continuously changing data is then represented as a finite sequence of such snapshots. Such data representations would be very inefficient to analyse, since it would require to mine the snapshots, extract a relevant dataset, and finally analyse it. For this problem, this thesis presents a temporal graph data model and storage system, which consider time as a first-class property. A time-relative navigation concept enables to analyse frequently changing data very efficiently. Secondly, making sustainable decisions requires to anticipate what impacts certain actions would have. Considering complex cyber-physical systems, it can come to situations where hundreds or thousands of such hypothetical actions must be explored before a solid decision can be made. Every action leads to an independent alternative from where a set of other actions can be applied and so forth. Finding the sequence of actions that leads to the desired alternative, requires to efficiently create, represent, and analyse many different alternatives. Given that every alternative has its own history, this creates a very high combinatorial complexity of alternatives and histories, which is hard to analyse. To tackle this problem, this dissertation introduces a multi-dimensional graph data model (as an extension of the temporal graph data model) that enables to efficiently represent, store, and analyse many different alternatives in live. Thirdly, complex cyber-physical systems are often distributed, but to fulfil their tasks these systems typically need to share context information between computational entities. This requires analytic algorithms to reason over distributed data, which is a complex task since it relies on the aggregation and processing of various distributed and constantly changing data. To address this challenge, this dissertation proposes an approach to transparently distribute the presented multi-dimensional graph data model in a peer-to-peer manner and defines a stream processing concept to efficiently handle frequent changes. Fourthly, to meet future needs, cyber-physical systems need to become increasingly intelligent. To make smart decisions, these systems have to continuously refine behavioural models that are known at design time, with what can only be learned from live data. Machine learning algorithms can help to solve this unknown behaviour by extracting commonalities over massive datasets. Nevertheless, searching a coarse-grained common behaviour model can be very inaccurate for cyber-physical systems, which are composed of completely different entities with very different behaviour. For these systems, fine-grained learning can be significantly more accurate. However, modelling, structuring, and synchronising many fine-grained learning units is challenging. To tackle this, this thesis presents an approach to define reusable, chainable, and independently computable fine-grained learning units, which can be modelled together with and on the same level as domain data. This allows to weave machine learning directly into the presented multi-dimensional graph data model. In summary, this thesis provides an efficient multi-dimensional graph data model to enable live analytics of complex, frequently changing, and distributed data of cyber-physical systems. This model can significantly improve data analytics for such systems and empower cyber-physical systems to make smart decisions in live. The presented solutions combine and extend methods from model-driven engineering, [email protected], data analytics, database systems, and machine learning