20,269 research outputs found
Robo-line storage: Low latency, high capacity storage systems over geographically distributed networks
Rapid advances in high performance computing are making possible more complete and accurate computer-based modeling of complex physical phenomena, such as weather front interactions, dynamics of chemical reactions, numerical aerodynamic analysis of airframes, and ocean-land-atmosphere interactions. Many of these 'grand challenge' applications are as demanding of the underlying storage system, in terms of their capacity and bandwidth requirements, as they are on the computational power of the processor. A global view of the Earth's ocean chlorophyll and land vegetation requires over 2 terabytes of raw satellite image data. In this paper, we describe our planned research program in high capacity, high bandwidth storage systems. The project has four overall goals. First, we will examine new methods for high capacity storage systems, made possible by low cost, small form factor magnetic and optical tape systems. Second, access to the storage system will be low latency and high bandwidth. To achieve this, we must interleave data transfer at all levels of the storage system, including devices, controllers, servers, and communications links. Latency will be reduced by extensive caching throughout the storage hierarchy. Third, we will provide effective management of a storage hierarchy, extending the techniques already developed for the Log Structured File System. Finally, we will construct a protototype high capacity file server, suitable for use on the National Research and Education Network (NREN). Such research must be a Cornerstone of any coherent program in high performance computing and communications
Scalable RDF Data Compression using X10
The Semantic Web comprises enormous volumes of semi-structured data elements.
For interoperability, these elements are represented by long strings. Such
representations are not efficient for the purposes of Semantic Web applications
that perform computations over large volumes of information. A typical method
for alleviating the impact of this problem is through the use of compression
methods that produce more compact representations of the data. The use of
dictionary encoding for this purpose is particularly prevalent in Semantic Web
database systems. However, centralized implementations present performance
bottlenecks, giving rise to the need for scalable, efficient distributed
encoding schemes. In this paper, we describe an encoding implementation based
on the asynchronous partitioned global address space (APGAS) parallel
programming model. We evaluate performance on a cluster of up to 384 cores and
datasets of up to 11 billion triples (1.9 TB). Compared to the state-of-art
MapReduce algorithm, we demonstrate a speedup of 2.6-7.4x and excellent
scalability. These results illustrate the strong potential of the APGAS model
for efficient implementation of dictionary encoding and contributes to the
engineering of larger scale Semantic Web applications
Self-Repairing Disk Arrays
As the prices of magnetic storage continue to decrease, the cost of replacing
failed disks becomes increasingly dominated by the cost of the service call
itself. We propose to eliminate these calls by building disk arrays that
contain enough spare disks to operate without any human intervention during
their whole lifetime. To evaluate the feasibility of this approach, we have
simulated the behavior of two-dimensional disk arrays with n parity disks and
n(n-1)/2 data disks under realistic failure and repair assumptions. Our
conclusion is that having n(n+1)/2 spare disks is more than enough to achieve a
99.999 percent probability of not losing data over four years. We observe that
the same objectives cannot be reached with RAID level 6 organizations and would
require RAID stripes that could tolerate triple disk failures.Comment: Part of ADAPT Workshop proceedings, 2015 (arXiv:1412.2347
CRAID: Online RAID upgrades using dynamic hot data reorganization
Current algorithms used to upgrade RAID arrays typically require large amounts of data to be migrated, even those that move only the minimum amount of data required to keep a balanced data load. This paper presents CRAID, a self-optimizing RAID array that performs an online block reorganization of frequently used, long-term accessed data in order to reduce this migration even further. To achieve this objective, CRAID tracks frequently used, long-term data blocks and copies them to a dedicated partition spread across all the disks in the array. When new disks are added, CRAID only needs to extend this process to the new devices to redistribute this partition, thus greatly reducing the overhead of the upgrade process. In addition, the reorganized access patterns within this partition improve the array’s performance, amortizing the copy overhead and allowing CRAID to offer a performance competitive with traditional RAIDs.
We describe CRAID’s motivation and design and we evaluate it by replaying seven real-world workloads including a file server, a web server and a user share. Our experiments show that CRAID can successfully detect hot data variations and begin using new disks as soon as they are added to the array. Also, the usage of a dedicated
partition improves the sequentiality of relevant data access, which amortizes the cost of reorganizations. Finally, we prove that a full-HDD CRAID array with a small distributed partition (<1.28% per disk) can compete in performance with an ideally restriped RAID-5 and a hybrid RAID-5 with a small SSD cache.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version
Storage Solutions for Big Data Systems: A Qualitative Study and Comparison
Big data systems development is full of challenges in view of the variety of
application areas and domains that this technology promises to serve.
Typically, fundamental design decisions involved in big data systems design
include choosing appropriate storage and computing infrastructures. In this age
of heterogeneous systems that integrate different technologies for optimized
solution to a specific real world problem, big data system are not an exception
to any such rule. As far as the storage aspect of any big data system is
concerned, the primary facet in this regard is a storage infrastructure and
NoSQL seems to be the right technology that fulfills its requirements. However,
every big data application has variable data characteristics and thus, the
corresponding data fits into a different data model. This paper presents
feature and use case analysis and comparison of the four main data models
namely document oriented, key value, graph and wide column. Moreover, a feature
analysis of 80 NoSQL solutions has been provided, elaborating on the criteria
and points that a developer must consider while making a possible choice.
Typically, big data storage needs to communicate with the execution engine and
other processing and visualization technologies to create a comprehensive
solution. This brings forth second facet of big data storage, big data file
formats, into picture. The second half of the research paper compares the
advantages, shortcomings and possible use cases of available big data file
formats for Hadoop, which is the foundation for most big data computing
technologies. Decentralized storage and blockchain are seen as the next
generation of big data storage and its challenges and future prospects have
also been discussed
Alpha Entanglement Codes: Practical Erasure Codes to Archive Data in Unreliable Environments
Data centres that use consumer-grade disks drives and distributed
peer-to-peer systems are unreliable environments to archive data without enough
redundancy. Most redundancy schemes are not completely effective for providing
high availability, durability and integrity in the long-term. We propose alpha
entanglement codes, a mechanism that creates a virtual layer of highly
interconnected storage devices to propagate redundant information across a
large scale storage system. Our motivation is to design flexible and practical
erasure codes with high fault-tolerance to improve data durability and
availability even in catastrophic scenarios. By flexible and practical, we mean
code settings that can be adapted to future requirements and practical
implementations with reasonable trade-offs between security, resource usage and
performance. The codes have three parameters. Alpha increases storage overhead
linearly but increases the possible paths to recover data exponentially. Two
other parameters increase fault-tolerance even further without the need of
additional storage. As a result, an entangled storage system can provide high
availability, durability and offer additional integrity: it is more difficult
to modify data undetectably. We evaluate how several redundancy schemes perform
in unreliable environments and show that alpha entanglement codes are flexible
and practical codes. Remarkably, they excel at code locality, hence, they
reduce repair costs and become less dependent on storage locations with poor
availability. Our solution outperforms Reed-Solomon codes in many disaster
recovery scenarios.Comment: The publication has 12 pages and 13 figures. This work was partially
supported by Swiss National Science Foundation SNSF Doc.Mobility 162014, 2018
48th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and
Networks (DSN
Long-baseline optical intensity interferometry: Laboratory demonstration of diffraction-limited imaging
A long-held vision has been to realize diffraction-limited optical aperture
synthesis over kilometer baselines. This will enable imaging of stellar
surfaces and their environments, and reveal interacting gas flows in binary
systems. An opportunity is now opening up with the large telescope arrays
primarily erected for measuring Cherenkov light in air induced by gamma rays.
With suitable software, such telescopes could be electronically connected and
also used for intensity interferometry. Second-order spatial coherence of light
is obtained by cross correlating intensity fluctuations measured in different
pairs of telescopes. With no optical links between them, the error budget is
set by the electronic time resolution of a few nanoseconds. Corresponding
light-travel distances are approximately one meter, making the method
practically immune to atmospheric turbulence or optical imperfections,
permitting both very long baselines and observing at short optical wavelengths.
Previous theoretical modeling has shown that full images should be possible to
retrieve from observations with such telescope arrays. This project aims at
verifying diffraction-limited imaging experimentally with groups of detached
and independent optical telescopes. In a large optics laboratory, artificial
stars were observed by an array of small telescopes. Using high-speed
photon-counting solid-state detectors, intensity fluctuations were
cross-correlated over up to 180 baselines between pairs of telescopes,
producing coherence maps across the interferometric Fourier-transform plane.
These measurements were used to extract parameters about the simulated stars,
and to reconstruct their two-dimensional images. As far as we are aware, these
are the first diffraction-limited images obtained from an optical array only
linked by electronic software, with no optical connections between the
telescopes.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figures, Astronomy & Astrophysics, in press. arXiv admin
note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1407.599
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