State-Compute Replication: Parallelizing High-Speed Stateful Packet Processing

With the slowdown of Moore's law, CPU-oriented packet processing in software will be significantly outpaced by emerging line speeds of network interface cards (NICs). Single-core packet-processing throughput has saturated. We consider the problem of high-speed packet processing with multiple CPU cores. The key challenge is state--memory that multiple packets must read and update. The prevailing method to scale throughput with multiple cores involves state sharding, processing all packets that update the same state, i.e., flow, at the same core. However, given the heavy-tailed nature of realistic flow size distributions, this method will be untenable in the near future, since total throughput is severely limited by single core performance. This paper introduces state-compute replication, a principle to scale the throughput of a single stateful flow across multiple cores using replication. Our design leverages a packet history sequencer running on a NIC or top-of-the-rack switch to enable multiple cores to update state without explicit synchronization. Our experiments with realistic data center and wide-area Internet traces shows that state-compute replication can scale total packet-processing throughput linearly with cores, deterministically and independent of flow size distributions, across a range of realistic packet-processing programs

Engineering Aggregation Operators for Relational In-Memory Database Systems

In this thesis we study the design and implementation of Aggregation operators in the context of relational in-memory database systems. In particular, we identify and address the following challenges: cache-efficiency, CPU-friendliness, parallelism within and across processors, robust handling of skewed data, adaptive processing, processing with constrained memory, and integration with modern database architectures. Our resulting algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art by up to 3.7x

Analysis and application of hash-based similarity estimation techniques for biological sequence analysis

In Bioinformatics, a large group of problems requires the computation or estimation of sequence similarity. However, the analysis of biological sequence data has, among many others, three capital challenges: a large amount generated data which contains technology-specific errors (that can be mistaken for biological signals), and that might need to be analyzed without access to a reference genome. Through the use of locality sensitive hashing methods, both the efficient estimation of sequence similarity and tolerance against the errors specific to biological data can be achieved. We developed a variant of the winnowing algorithm for local minimizer computation, which is specifically geared to deal with repetitive regions within biological sequences. Through compressing redundant information, we can both reduce the size of the hash tables required to save minimizer sketches, as well as reduce the amount of redundant low quality alignment candidates. Analyzing the distribution of segment lengths generated by this approach, we can better judge the size of required data structures, as well as identify hash functions feasible for this technique. Our evaluation could verify that simple and fast hash functions, even when using small hash value spaces (hash functions with small codomain), are sufficient to compute compressed minimizers and perform comparable to uniformly randomly chosen hash values. We also outlined an index for a taxonomic protein database using multiple compressed winnowings to identify alignment candidates. To store MinHash values, we present a cache-optimized implementation of a hash table using Hopscotch hashing to resolve collisions. As a biological application of similarity based analysis, we describe the analysis of double digest restriction site associated DNA sequencing (ddRADseq). We implemented a simulation software able to model the biological and technological influences of this technology to allow better development and testing of ddRADseq analysis software. Using datasets generated by our software, as well as data obtained from population genetic experiments, we developed an analysis workflow for ddRADseq data, based on the Stacks software. Since the quality of results generated by Stacks strongly depends on how well the used parameters are adapted to the specific dataset, we developed a Snakemake workflow that automates preprocessing tasks while also allowing the automatic exploration of different parameter sets. As part of this workflow, we developed a PCR deduplication approach able to generate consensus reads incorporating the base quality values (as reported by the sequencing device), without performing an alignment first. As an outlook, we outline a MinHashing approach that can be used for a faster and more robust clustering, while addressing incomplete digestion and null alleles, two effects specific for ddRADseq that current analysis tools cannot reliably detect

Parallelizing Set Similarity Joins

Eine der größten Herausforderungen in Data Science ist heutzutage, Daten miteinander in Beziehung zu setzen und ähnliche Daten zu finden. Hierzu kann der aus relationalen Datenbanken bekannte Join-Operator eingesetzt werden. Das Konzept der Ähnlichkeit wird häufig durch mengenbasierte Ähnlichkeitsfunktionen gemessen. Um solche Funktionen als Join-Prädikat nutzen zu können, setzt diese Arbeit voraus, dass Records aus Mengen von Tokens bestehen. Die Arbeit fokussiert sich auf den mengenbasierten Ähnlichkeitsjoin, Set Similarity Join (SSJ). Die Datenmenge, die es heute zu verarbeiten gilt, ist groß und wächst weiter. Der SSJ hingegen ist eine rechenintensive Operation. Um ihn auf großen Daten ausführen zu können, sind neue Ansätze notwendig. Diese Arbeit fokussiert sich auf das Mittel der Parallelisierung. Sie leistet folgende drei Beiträge auf dem Gebiet der SSJs. Erstens beschreibt und untersucht die Arbeit den aktuellen Stand paralleler SSJ-Ansätze. Diese Arbeit vergleicht zehn Map-Reduce-basierte Ansätze aus der Literatur sowohl analytisch als auch experimentell. Der größte Schwachpunkt aller Ansätze ist überraschenderweise eine geringe Skalierbarkeit aufgrund zu hoher Datenreplikation und/ oder ungleich verteilter Daten. Keiner der Ansätze kann den SSJ auf großen Daten berechnen. Zweitens macht die Arbeit die verfügbare hohe CPU-Parallelität moderner Rechner für den SSJ nutzbar. Sie stellt einen neuen daten-parallelen multi-threaded SSJ-Ansatz vor. Der vorgestellte Ansatz ermöglicht erhebliche Laufzeit-Beschleunigungen gegenüber der Ausführung auf einem Thread. Drittens stellt die Arbeit einen neuen hoch skalierbaren verteilten SSJ-Ansatz vor. Mit einer kostenbasierten Heuristik und einem daten-unabhängigen Skalierungsmechanismus vermeidet er Daten-Replikation und wiederholte Berechnungen. Der Ansatz beschleunigt die Join-Ausführung signifikant und ermöglicht die Ausführung auf erheblich größeren Datenmengen als bisher betrachtete parallele Ansätze.One of today's major challenges in data science is to compare and relate data of similar nature. Using the join operation known from relational databases could help solving this problem. Given a collection of records, the join operation finds all pairs of records, which fulfill a user-chosen predicate. Real-world problems could require complex predicates, such as similarity. A common way to measure similarity are set similarity functions. In order to use set similarity functions as predicates, we assume records to be represented by sets of tokens. In this thesis, we focus on the set similarity join (SSJ) operation. The amount of data to be processed today is typically large and grows continually. On the other hand, the SSJ is a compute-intensive operation. To cope with the increasing size of input data, additional means are needed to develop scalable implementations for SSJ. In this thesis, we focus on parallelization. We make the following three major contributions to SSJ. First, we elaborate on the state-of-the-art in parallelizing SSJ. We compare ten MapReduce-based approaches from the literature analytically and experimentally. Their main limit is surprisingly a low scalability due to too high and/or skewed data replication. None of the approaches could compute the join on large datasets. Second, we leverage the abundant CPU parallelism of modern commodity hardware, which has not yet been considered to scale SSJ. We propose a novel data-parallel multi-threaded SSJ. Our approach provides significant speedups compared to single-threaded executions. Third, we propose a novel highly scalable distributed SSJ approach. With a cost-based heuristic and a data-independent scaling mechanism we avoid data replication and recomputation. A heuristic assigns similar shares of compute costs to each node. Our approach significantly scales up the join execution and processes much larger datasets than all parallel approaches designed and implemented so far

Uncovering Features in Behaviorally Similar Programs

The detection of similar code can support many so ware engineering tasks such as program understanding and program classification. Many excellent approaches have been proposed to detect programs having similar syntactic features. However, these approaches are unable to identify programs dynamically or statistically close to each other, which we call behaviorally similar programs. We believe the detection of behaviorally similar programs can enhance or even automate the tasks relevant to program classification. In this thesis, we will discuss our current approaches to identify programs having similar behavioral features in multiple perspectives. We first discuss how to detect programs having similar functionality. While the definition of a program’s functionality is undecidable, we use inputs and outputs (I/Os) of programs as the proxy of their functionality. We then use I/Os of programs as a behavioral feature to detect which programs are functionally similar: two programs are functionally similar if they share similar inputs and outputs. This approach has been studied and developed in the C language to detect functionally equivalent programs having equivalent I/Os. Nevertheless, some natural problems in Object Oriented languages, such as input generation and comparisons between application-specific data types, hinder the development of this approach. We propose a new technique, in-vivo detection, which uses existing and meaningful inputs to drive applications systematically and then applies a novel similarity model considering both inputs and outputs of programs, to detect functionally similar programs. We develop the tool, HitoshiIO, based on our in-vivo detection. In the subjects that we study, HitoshiIO correctly detect 68.4% of functionally similar programs, where its false positive rate is only 16.6%. In addition to functional I/Os of programs, we attempt to discover programs having similar execution behavior. Again, the execution behavior of a program can be undecidable, so we use instructions executed at run-time as a behavioral feature of a program. We create DyCLINK, which observes program executions and encodes them in dynamic instruction graphs. A vertex in a dynamic instruction graph is an instruction and an edge is a type of dependency between two instructions. The problem to detect which programs have similar executions can then be reduced to a problem of solving inexact graph isomorphism. We propose a link analysis based algorithm, LinkSub, which vectorizes each dynamic instruction graph by the importance of every instruction, to solve this graph isomorphism problem efficiently. In a K Nearest Neighbor (KNN) based program classification experiment, DyCLINK achieves 90 + % precision. Because HitoshiIO and DyCLINK both rely on dynamic analysis to expose program behavior, they have better capability to locate and search for behaviorally similar programs than traditional static analysis tools. However, they suffer from some common problems of dynamic analysis, such as input generation and run-time overhead. These problems may make our approaches challenging to scale. Thus, we create the system, Macneto, which integrates static analysis with machine topic modeling and deep learning to approximate program behaviors from their binaries without truly executing programs. In our deobfuscation experiments considering two commercial obfuscators that alter lexical information and syntax in programs, Macneto achieves 90 + % precision, where the groundtruth is that the behavior of a program before and after obfuscation should be the same. In this thesis, we offer a more extensive view of similar programs than the traditional definitions. While the traditional definitions of similar programs mostly use static features, such as syntax and lexical information, we propose to leverage the power of dynamic analysis and machine learning models to trace/collect behavioral features of pro- grams. These behavioral features of programs can then apply to detect behaviorally similar programs. We believe the techniques we invented in this thesis to detect behaviorally similar programs can improve the development of software engineering and security applications, such as code search and deobfuscation

Recruitment of rare 3-grams at functional sites: Is this a mechanism for increasing enzyme specificity?

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>A wealth of unannotated and functionally unknown protein sequences has accumulated in recent years with rapid progresses in sequence genomics, giving rise to ever increasing demands for developing methods to efficiently assess functional sites. Sequence and structure conservations have traditionally been the major criteria adopted in various algorithms to identify functional sites. Here, we focus on the distributions of the 20³different types of <it>3</it>-grams (or triplets of sequentially contiguous amino acid) in the entire space of sequences accumulated to date in the UniProt database, and focus in particular on the rare <it>3</it>-grams distinguished by their high entropy-based information content.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Comparison of the UniProt distributions with those observed near/at the active sites on a non-redundant dataset of 59 enzyme/ligand complexes shows that the active sites preferentially recruit <it>3</it>-grams distinguished by their low frequency in the UniProt. Three cases, Src kinase, hemoglobin, and tyrosyl-tRNA synthetase, are discussed in details to illustrate the biological significance of the results.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The results suggest that recruitment of rare <it>3</it>-grams may be an efficient mechanism for increasing specificity at functional sites. Rareness/scarcity emerges as a feature that may assist in identifying key sites for proteins function, providing information complementary to that derived from sequence alignments. In addition it provides us (for the first time) with a means of identifying potentially functional sites from sequence information alone, when sequence conservation properties are not available.</p