43,476 research outputs found
S+Net: extending functional coordination with extra-functional semantics
This technical report introduces S+Net, a compositional coordination language
for streaming networks with extra-functional semantics. Compositionality
simplifies the specification of complex parallel and distributed applications;
extra-functional semantics allow the application designer to reason about and
control resource usage, performance and fault handling. The key feature of
S+Net is that functional and extra-functional semantics are defined
orthogonally from each other. S+Net can be seen as a simultaneous
simplification and extension of the existing coordination language S-Net, that
gives control of extra-functional behavior to the S-Net programmer. S+Net can
also be seen as a transitional research step between S-Net and AstraKahn,
another coordination language currently being designed at the University of
Hertfordshire. In contrast with AstraKahn which constitutes a re-design from
the ground up, S+Net preserves the basic operational semantics of S-Net and
thus provides an incremental introduction of extra-functional control in an
existing language.Comment: 34 pages, 11 figures, 3 table
Lattice QCD Thermodynamics on the Grid
We describe how we have used simultaneously nodes of the
EGEE Grid, accumulating ca. 300 CPU-years in 2-3 months, to determine an
important property of Quantum Chromodynamics. We explain how Grid resources
were exploited efficiently and with ease, using user-level overlay based on
Ganga and DIANE tools above standard Grid software stack. Application-specific
scheduling and resource selection based on simple but powerful heuristics
allowed to improve efficiency of the processing to obtain desired scientific
results by a specified deadline. This is also a demonstration of combined use
of supercomputers, to calculate the initial state of the QCD system, and Grids,
to perform the subsequent massively distributed simulations. The QCD simulation
was performed on a lattice. Keeping the strange quark mass at
its physical value, we reduced the masses of the up and down quarks until,
under an increase of temperature, the system underwent a second-order phase
transition to a quark-gluon plasma. Then we measured the response of this
system to an increase in the quark density. We find that the transition is
smoothened rather than sharpened. If confirmed on a finer lattice, this finding
makes it unlikely for ongoing experimental searches to find a QCD critical
point at small chemical potential
Recommended from our members
A dynamic petri net model for iterative and interactive distributed multimedia presentation
Object Composition Petri Nets (OCPN), Priority Petri Nets (P-Net), Dynamic OCPN (DOCPN) and Enhanced P-Nets (EP-Net) have extended the original Petri Net to achieve the modeling of media synchronization and asynchronous user interactions during multimedia playback. Dynamic Petri Net (DPN) has been conceptualized to tackle existing problems in these two areas of modeling distributed multimedia systems. DPN features dynamic modeling elements which allows iteration and hence is able to reduce graph sizes of synchronous playback models while allowing greater details to be shown. DPN also introduces asynchronous event handling techniques that are powerful and effective. DPN was used in the design and modeling of a multimedia orchestration tool which is a typical representation of an application that works in a distributed multimedia system
Taming Numbers and Durations in the Model Checking Integrated Planning System
The Model Checking Integrated Planning System (MIPS) is a temporal least
commitment heuristic search planner based on a flexible object-oriented
workbench architecture. Its design clearly separates explicit and symbolic
directed exploration algorithms from the set of on-line and off-line computed
estimates and associated data structures. MIPS has shown distinguished
performance in the last two international planning competitions. In the last
event the description language was extended from pure propositional planning to
include numerical state variables, action durations, and plan quality objective
functions. Plans were no longer sequences of actions but time-stamped
schedules. As a participant of the fully automated track of the competition,
MIPS has proven to be a general system; in each track and every benchmark
domain it efficiently computed plans of remarkable quality. This article
introduces and analyzes the most important algorithmic novelties that were
necessary to tackle the new layers of expressiveness in the benchmark problems
and to achieve a high level of performance. The extensions include critical
path analysis of sequentially generated plans to generate corresponding optimal
parallel plans. The linear time algorithm to compute the parallel plan bypasses
known NP hardness results for partial ordering by scheduling plans with respect
to the set of actions and the imposed precedence relations. The efficiency of
this algorithm also allows us to improve the exploration guidance: for each
encountered planning state the corresponding approximate sequential plan is
scheduled. One major strength of MIPS is its static analysis phase that grounds
and simplifies parameterized predicates, functions and operators, that infers
knowledge to minimize the state description length, and that detects domain
object symmetries. The latter aspect is analyzed in detail. MIPS has been
developed to serve as a complete and optimal state space planner, with
admissible estimates, exploration engines and branching cuts. In the
competition version, however, certain performance compromises had to be made,
including floating point arithmetic, weighted heuristic search exploration
according to an inadmissible estimate and parameterized optimization
FLICK: developing and running application-specific network services
Data centre networks are increasingly programmable, with application-specific network services proliferating, from custom load-balancers to middleboxes providing caching and aggregation. Developers must currently implement these services using traditional low-level APIs, which neither support natural operations on application data nor provide efficient performance isolation. We describe FLICK, a framework for the programming and execution of application-specific network services on multi-core CPUs. Developers write network services in the FLICK language, which offers high-level processing constructs and application-relevant data types. FLICK programs are translated automatically to efficient, parallel task graphs, implemented in C++ on top of a user-space TCP stack. Task graphs have bounded resource usage at runtime, which means that the graphs of multiple services can execute concurrently without interference using cooperative scheduling. We evaluate FLICK with several services (an HTTP load-balancer, a Memcached router and a Hadoop data aggregator), showing that it achieves good performance while reducing development effort
Feedback Allocation For OFDMA Systems With Slow Frequency-domain Scheduling
We study the problem of allocating limited feedback resources across multiple
users in an orthogonal-frequency-division-multiple-access downlink system with
slow frequency-domain scheduling. Many flavors of slow frequency-domain
scheduling (e.g., persistent scheduling, semi-persistent scheduling), that
adapt user-sub-band assignments on a slower time-scale, are being considered in
standards such as 3GPP Long-Term Evolution. In this paper, we develop a
feedback allocation algorithm that operates in conjunction with any arbitrary
slow frequency-domain scheduler with the goal of improving the throughput of
the system. Given a user-sub-band assignment chosen by the scheduler, the
feedback allocation algorithm involves solving a weighted sum-rate maximization
at each (slow) scheduling instant. We first develop an optimal
dynamic-programming-based algorithm to solve the feedback allocation problem
with pseudo-polynomial complexity in the number of users and in the total
feedback bit budget. We then propose two approximation algorithms with
complexity further reduced, for scenarios where the problem exhibits additional
structure.Comment: Accepted to IEEE Transactions on Signal Processin
- …