11,441 research outputs found
Workflow Partitioning and Deployment on the Cloud using Orchestra
Orchestrating service-oriented workflows is typically based on a design model
that routes both data and control through a single point - the centralised
workflow engine. This causes scalability problems that include the unnecessary
consumption of the network bandwidth, high latency in transmitting data between
the services, and performance bottlenecks. These problems are highly prominent
when orchestrating workflows that are composed from services dispersed across
distant geographical locations. This paper presents a novel workflow
partitioning approach, which attempts to improve the scalability of
orchestrating large-scale workflows. It permits the workflow computation to be
moved towards the services providing the data in order to garner optimal
performance results. This is achieved by decomposing the workflow into smaller
sub workflows for parallel execution, and determining the most appropriate
network locations to which these sub workflows are transmitted and subsequently
executed. This paper demonstrates the efficiency of our approach using a set of
experimental workflows that are orchestrated over Amazon EC2 and across several
geographic network regions.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM 7th International Conference
on Utility and Cloud Computing (UCC 2014
Policy-based techniques for self-managing parallel applications
This paper presents an empirical investigation of policy-based self-management techniques for parallel applications executing in loosely-coupled environments. The dynamic and heterogeneous nature of these environments is discussed and the special considerations for parallel applications are identified. An adaptive strategy for the run-time deployment of tasks of parallel applications is presented. The strategy is based on embedding numerous policies which are informed by contextual and environmental inputs. The policies govern various aspects of behaviour, enhancing flexibility so that the goals of efficiency and performance are achieved despite high levels of environmental variability. A prototype self-managing parallel application is used as a vehicle to explore the feasibility and benefits of the strategy. In particular, several aspects of stability are investigated. The implementation and behaviour of three policies are discussed and sample results examined
Collocation Games and Their Application to Distributed Resource Management
We introduce Collocation Games as the basis of a general framework for modeling, analyzing, and facilitating the interactions between the various stakeholders in distributed systems in general, and in cloud computing environments in particular. Cloud computing enables fixed-capacity (processing, communication, and storage) resources to be offered by infrastructure providers as commodities for sale at a fixed cost in an open marketplace to independent, rational parties (players) interested in setting up their own applications over the Internet. Virtualization technologies enable the partitioning of such fixed-capacity resources so as to allow each player to dynamically acquire appropriate fractions of the resources for unencumbered use. In such a paradigm, the resource management problem reduces to that of partitioning the entire set of applications (players) into subsets, each of which is assigned to fixed-capacity cloud resources. If the infrastructure and the various applications are under a single administrative domain, this partitioning reduces to an optimization problem whose objective is to minimize the overall deployment cost. In a marketplace, in which the infrastructure provider is interested in maximizing its own profit, and in which each player is interested in minimizing its own cost, it should be evident that a global optimization is precisely the wrong framework. Rather, in this paper we use a game-theoretic framework in which the assignment of players to fixed-capacity resources is the outcome of a strategic "Collocation Game". Although we show that determining the existence of an equilibrium for collocation games in general is NP-hard, we present a number of simplified, practically-motivated variants of the collocation game for which we establish convergence to a Nash Equilibrium, and for which we derive convergence and price of anarchy bounds. In addition to these analytical results, we present an experimental evaluation of implementations of some of these variants for cloud infrastructures consisting of a collection of multidimensional resources of homogeneous or heterogeneous capacities. Experimental results using trace-driven simulations and synthetically generated datasets corroborate our analytical results and also illustrate how collocation games offer a feasible distributed resource management alternative for autonomic/self-organizing systems, in which the adoption of a global optimization approach (centralized or distributed) would be neither practical nor justifiable.NSF (CCF-0820138, CSR-0720604, EFRI-0735974, CNS-0524477, CNS-052016, CCR-0635102); Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana; COLCIENCIAS–Instituto Colombiano para el Desarrollo de la Ciencia y la TecnologĂa "Francisco JosĂ© de Caldas
Hierarchical path-finding for Navigation Meshes (HNA*)
Path-finding can become an important bottleneck as both the size of the virtual environments and the number of agents navigating them increase. It is important to develop techniques that can be efficiently applied to any environment independently of its abstract representation. In this paper we present a hierarchical NavMesh representation to speed up path-finding. Hierarchical path-finding (HPA*) has been successfully applied to regular grids, but there is a need to extend the benefits of this method to polygonal navigation meshes. As opposed to regular grids, navigation meshes offer representations with higher accuracy regarding the underlying geometry, while containing a smaller number of cells. Therefore, we present a bottom-up method to create a hierarchical representation based on a multilevel k-way partitioning algorithm (MLkP), annotated with sub-paths that can be accessed online by our Hierarchical NavMesh Path-finding algorithm (HNA*). The algorithm benefits from searching in graphs with a much smaller number of cells, thus performing up to 7.7 times faster than traditional AÂż over the initial NavMesh. We present results of HNA* over a variety of scenarios and discuss the benefits of the algorithm together with areas for improvement.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
A Graph-Partition-Based Scheduling Policy for Heterogeneous Architectures
In order to improve system performance efficiently, a number of systems
choose to equip multi-core and many-core processors (such as GPUs). Due to
their discrete memory these heterogeneous architectures comprise a distributed
system within a computer. A data-flow programming model is attractive in this
setting for its ease of expressing concurrency. Programmers only need to define
task dependencies without considering how to schedule them on the hardware.
However, mapping the resulting task graph onto hardware efficiently remains a
challenge. In this paper, we propose a graph-partition scheduling policy for
mapping data-flow workloads to heterogeneous hardware. According to our
experiments, our graph-partition-based scheduling achieves comparable
performance to conventional queue-base approaches.Comment: Presented at DATE Friday Workshop on Heterogeneous Architectures and
Design Methods for Embedded Image Systems (HIS 2015) (arXiv:1502.07241
Efficient Irregular Wavefront Propagation Algorithms on Hybrid CPU-GPU Machines
In this paper, we address the problem of efficient execution of a computation
pattern, referred to here as the irregular wavefront propagation pattern
(IWPP), on hybrid systems with multiple CPUs and GPUs. The IWPP is common in
several image processing operations. In the IWPP, data elements in the
wavefront propagate waves to their neighboring elements on a grid if a
propagation condition is satisfied. Elements receiving the propagated waves
become part of the wavefront. This pattern results in irregular data accesses
and computations. We develop and evaluate strategies for efficient computation
and propagation of wavefronts using a multi-level queue structure. This queue
structure improves the utilization of fast memories in a GPU and reduces
synchronization overheads. We also develop a tile-based parallelization
strategy to support execution on multiple CPUs and GPUs. We evaluate our
approaches on a state-of-the-art GPU accelerated machine (equipped with 3 GPUs
and 2 multicore CPUs) using the IWPP implementations of two widely used image
processing operations: morphological reconstruction and euclidean distance
transform. Our results show significant performance improvements on GPUs. The
use of multiple CPUs and GPUs cooperatively attains speedups of 50x and 85x
with respect to single core CPU executions for morphological reconstruction and
euclidean distance transform, respectively.Comment: 37 pages, 16 figure
MPICH-G2: A Grid-Enabled Implementation of the Message Passing Interface
Application development for distributed computing "Grids" can benefit from
tools that variously hide or enable application-level management of critical
aspects of the heterogeneous environment. As part of an investigation of these
issues, we have developed MPICH-G2, a Grid-enabled implementation of the
Message Passing Interface (MPI) that allows a user to run MPI programs across
multiple computers, at the same or different sites, using the same commands
that would be used on a parallel computer. This library extends the Argonne
MPICH implementation of MPI to use services provided by the Globus Toolkit for
authentication, authorization, resource allocation, executable staging, and
I/O, as well as for process creation, monitoring, and control. Various
performance-critical operations, including startup and collective operations,
are configured to exploit network topology information. The library also
exploits MPI constructs for performance management; for example, the MPI
communicator construct is used for application-level discovery of, and
adaptation to, both network topology and network quality-of-service mechanisms.
We describe the MPICH-G2 design and implementation, present performance
results, and review application experiences, including record-setting
distributed simulations.Comment: 20 pages, 8 figure
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