Synaptic state matching: a dynamical architecture for predictive internal representation and feature perception

Here we consider the possibility that a fundamental function of sensory cortex is the generation of an internal simulation of sensory environment in real-time. A logical elaboration of this idea leads to a dynamical neural architecture that oscillates between two fundamental network states, one driven by external input, and the other by recurrent synaptic drive in the absence of sensory input. Synaptic strength is modified by a proposed synaptic state matching (SSM) process that ensures equivalence of spike statistics between the two network states. Remarkably, SSM, operating locally at individual synapses, generates accurate and stable network-level predictive internal representations, enabling pattern completion and unsupervised feature detection from noisy sensory input. SSM is a biologically plausible substrate for learning and memory because it brings together sequence learning, feature detection, synaptic homeostasis, and network oscillations under a single parsimonious computational framework. Beyond its utility as a potential model of cortical computation, artificial networks based on this principle have remarkable capacity for internalizing dynamical systems, making them useful in a variety of application domains including time-series prediction and machine intelligence

A skewness-aware matrix factorization approach for mesh-structured cloud services

© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Online cloud services need to fulfill clients' requests scalably and fast. State-of-the-art cloud services are increasingly deployed as a distributed service mesh. Service to service communication is frequent in the mesh. Unfortunately, problematic events may occur between any pair of nodes in the mesh, therefore, it is vital to maximize the network visibility. A state-of-the-art approach is to model pairwise RTTs based on a latent factor model represented as a low-rank matrix factorization. A latent factor corresponds to a rank-1 component in the factorization model, and is shared by all node pairs. However, different node pairs usually experience a skewed set of hidden factors, which should be fully considered in the model. In this paper, we propose a skewness-aware matrix factorization method named SMF. We decompose the matrix factorization into basic units of rank-one latent factors, and progressively combine rank-one factors for different node pairs. We present a unifying framework to automatically and adaptively select the rank-one factors for each node pair, which not only preserves the low rankness of the matrix model, but also adapts to skewed network latency distributions. Over real-world RTT data sets, SMF significantly improves the relative error by a factor of 0.2 x to 10 x, converges fast and stably, and compactly captures fine-grained local and global network latency structures.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Performance Reproduction and Prediction of Selected Dynamic Loop Scheduling Experiments

Scientific applications are complex, large, and often exhibit irregular and stochastic behavior. The use of efficient loop scheduling techniques in computationally-intensive applications is crucial for improving their performance on high-performance computing (HPC) platforms. A number of dynamic loop scheduling (DLS) techniques have been proposed between the late 1980s and early 2000s, and efficiently used in scientific applications. In most cases, the computing systems on which they have been tested and validated are no longer available. This work is concerned with the minimization of the sources of uncertainty in the implementation of DLS techniques to avoid unnecessary influences on the performance of scientific applications. Therefore, it is important to ensure that the DLS techniques employed in scientific applications today adhere to their original design goals and specifications. The goal of this work is to attain and increase the trust in the implementation of DLS techniques in present studies. To achieve this goal, the performance of a selection of scheduling experiments from the 1992 original work that introduced factoring is reproduced and predicted via both, simulative and native experimentation. The experiments show that the simulation reproduces the performance achieved on the past computing platform and accurately predicts the performance achieved on the present computing platform. The performance reproduction and prediction confirm that the present implementation of the DLS techniques considered both, in simulation and natively, adheres to their original description. The results confirm the hypothesis that reproducing experiments of identical scheduling scenarios on past and modern hardware leads to an entirely different behavior from expected

Datacenter Traffic Control: Understanding Techniques and Trade-offs

Datacenters provide cost-effective and flexible access to scalable compute and storage resources necessary for today's cloud computing needs. A typical datacenter is made up of thousands of servers connected with a large network and usually managed by one operator. To provide quality access to the variety of applications and services hosted on datacenters and maximize performance, it deems necessary to use datacenter networks effectively and efficiently. Datacenter traffic is often a mix of several classes with different priorities and requirements. This includes user-generated interactive traffic, traffic with deadlines, and long-running traffic. To this end, custom transport protocols and traffic management techniques have been developed to improve datacenter network performance. In this tutorial paper, we review the general architecture of datacenter networks, various topologies proposed for them, their traffic properties, general traffic control challenges in datacenters and general traffic control objectives. The purpose of this paper is to bring out the important characteristics of traffic control in datacenters and not to survey all existing solutions (as it is virtually impossible due to massive body of existing research). We hope to provide readers with a wide range of options and factors while considering a variety of traffic control mechanisms. We discuss various characteristics of datacenter traffic control including management schemes, transmission control, traffic shaping, prioritization, load balancing, multipathing, and traffic scheduling. Next, we point to several open challenges as well as new and interesting networking paradigms. At the end of this paper, we briefly review inter-datacenter networks that connect geographically dispersed datacenters which have been receiving increasing attention recently and pose interesting and novel research problems.Comment: Accepted for Publication in IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial