A Lightweight and Flexible Mobile Agent Platform Tailored to Management Applications

Mobile Agents (MAs) represent a distributed computing technology that promises to address the scalability problems of centralized network management. A critical issue that will affect the wider adoption of MA paradigm in management applications is the development of MA Platforms (MAPs) expressly oriented to distributed management. However, most of available platforms impose considerable burden on network and system resources and also lack of essential functionality. In this paper, we discuss the design considerations and implementation details of a complete MAP research prototype that sufficiently addresses all the aforementioned issues. Our MAP has been implemented in Java and tailored for network and systems management applications.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures; Proceedings of the 2006 Conference on Mobile Computing and Wireless Communications (MCWC'2006

Enabling preemptive multiprogramming on GPUs

GPUs are being increasingly adopted as compute accelerators in many domains, spanning environments from mobile systems to cloud computing. These systems are usually running multiple applications, from one or several users. However GPUs do not provide the support for resource sharing traditionally expected in these scenarios. Thus, such systems are unable to provide key multiprogrammed workload requirements, such as responsiveness, fairness or quality of service. In this paper, we propose a set of hardware extensions that allow GPUs to efficiently support multiprogrammed GPU workloads. We argue for preemptive multitasking and design two preemption mechanisms that can be used to implement GPU scheduling policies. We extend the architecture to allow concurrent execution of GPU kernels from different user processes and implement a scheduling policy that dynamically distributes the GPU cores among concurrently running kernels, according to their priorities. We extend the NVIDIA GK110 (Kepler) like GPU architecture with our proposals and evaluate them on a set of multiprogrammed workloads with up to eight concurrent processes. Our proposals improve execution time of high-priority processes by 15.6x, the average application turnaround time between 1.5x to 2x, and system fairness up to 3.4x.We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers, Alexan- der Veidenbaum, Carlos Villavieja, Lluis Vilanova, Lluc Al- varez, and Marc Jorda on their comments and help improving our work and this paper. This work is supported by Euro- pean Commission through TERAFLUX (FP7-249013), Mont- Blanc (FP7-288777), and RoMoL (GA-321253) projects, NVIDIA through the CUDA Center of Excellence program, Spanish Government through Programa Severo Ochoa (SEV-2011-0067) and Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology through TIN2007-60625 and TIN2012-34557 projects.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft

EVEREST IST - 2002 - 00185 : D23 : final report

Deliverable públic del projecte europeu EVERESTThis deliverable constitutes the final report of the project IST-2002-001858 EVEREST. After its successful completion, the project presents this document that firstly summarizes the context, goal and the approach objective of the project. Then it presents a concise summary of the major goals and results, as well as highlights the most valuable lessons derived form the project work. A list of deliverables and publications is included in the annex.Postprint (published version

SymbioCity: Smart Cities for Smarter Networks

The "Smart City" (SC) concept revolves around the idea of embodying cutting-edge ICT solutions in the very fabric of future cities, in order to offer new and better services to citizens while lowering the city management costs, both in monetary, social, and environmental terms. In this framework, communication technologies are perceived as subservient to the SC services, providing the means to collect and process the data needed to make the services function. In this paper, we propose a new vision in which technology and SC services are designed to take advantage of each other in a symbiotic manner. According to this new paradigm, which we call "SymbioCity", SC services can indeed be exploited to improve the performance of the same communication systems that provide them with data. Suggestive examples of this symbiotic ecosystem are discussed in the paper. The dissertation is then substantiated in a proof-of-concept case study, where we show how the traffic monitoring service provided by the London Smart City initiative can be used to predict the density of users in a certain zone and optimize the cellular service in that area.Comment: 14 pages, submitted for publication to ETT Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologie

Extending Memory Capacity in Consumer Devices with Emerging Non-Volatile Memory: An Experimental Study

The number and diversity of consumer devices are growing rapidly, alongside their target applications' memory consumption. Unfortunately, DRAM scalability is becoming a limiting factor to the available memory capacity in consumer devices. As a potential solution, manufacturers have introduced emerging non-volatile memories (NVMs) into the market, which can be used to increase the memory capacity of consumer devices by augmenting or replacing DRAM. Since entirely replacing DRAM with NVM in consumer devices imposes large system integration and design challenges, recent works propose extending the total main memory space available to applications by using NVM as swap space for DRAM. However, no prior work analyzes the implications of enabling a real NVM-based swap space in real consumer devices. In this work, we provide the first analysis of the impact of extending the main memory space of consumer devices using off-the-shelf NVMs. We extensively examine system performance and energy consumption when the NVM device is used as swap space for DRAM main memory to effectively extend the main memory capacity. For our analyses, we equip real web-based Chromebook computers with the Intel Optane SSD, which is a state-of-the-art low-latency NVM-based SSD device. We compare the performance and energy consumption of interactive workloads running on our Chromebook with NVM-based swap space, where the Intel Optane SSD capacity is used as swap space to extend main memory capacity, against two state-of-the-art systems: (i) a baseline system with double the amount of DRAM than the system with the NVM-based swap space; and (ii) a system where the Intel Optane SSD is naively replaced with a state-of-the-art (yet slower) off-the-shelf NAND-flash-based SSD, which we use as a swap space of equivalent size as the NVM-based swap space