Energy Saving and Scavenging in Stand-alone and Large Scale Distributed Systems.

This thesis focuses on energy management techniques for distributed systems such as hand-held mobile devices, sensor nodes, and data center servers. One of the major design problems in multiple application domains is the mismatch between workloads and resources. Sub-optimal assignment of workloads to resources can cause underloaded or overloaded resources, resulting in performance degradation or energy waste. This work specifically focuses on the heterogeneity in system hardware components and workloads. It includes energy management solutions for unregulated or batteryless embedded systems; and data center servers with heterogeneous workloads, machines, and processor wear states. This thesis describes four major contributions: (1) This thesis describes a battery test and energy delivery system design process to maintain battery life in embedded systems without voltage regulators. (2) In battery-less sensor nodes, this thesis demonstrates a routing protocol to maintain reliable transmission through the sensor network. (3) This thesis has characterized typical workloads and developed two models to capture the heterogeneity of data center tasks and machines: a task performance model and a machine resource utilization model. These models allow users to predict task finish time on individual machines. It then integrates these two models into a task scheduler based on the Hadoop framework for MapReduce tasks, and uses this scheduler for server energy minimization using task concentration. (4) In addition to saving server energy consumption, this thesis describes a method of reducing data center cooling energy by maintaining optimal server processor temperature setpoints through a task assignment algorithm. This algorithm considers the reliability impact of processor wear states. It records processor wear states through automatic timing slack tests on a cluster of machines with varying core temperatures, voltages, and frequencies. These optimal temperature setpoints are used in a task scheduling algorithm that saves both server and cooling energy.PhDElectrical EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/116746/1/xjhe_1.pd

Research on High-performance and Scalable Data Access in Parallel Big Data Computing

To facilitate big data processing, many dedicated data-intensive storage systems such as Google File System(GFS), Hadoop Distributed File System(HDFS) and Quantcast File System(QFS) have been developed. Currently, the Hadoop Distributed File System(HDFS) [20] is the state-of-art and most popular open-source distributed file system for big data processing. It is widely deployed as the bedrock for many big data processing systems/frameworks, such as the script-based pig system, MPI-based parallel programs, graph processing systems and scala/java-based Spark frameworks. These systems/applications employ parallel processes/executors to speed up data processing within scale-out clusters. Job or task schedulers in parallel big data applications such as mpiBLAST and ParaView can maximize the usage of computing resources such as memory and CPU by tracking resource consumption/availability for task assignment. However, since these schedulers do not take the distributed I/O resources and global data distribution into consideration, the data requests from parallel processes/executors in big data processing will unfortunately be served in an imbalanced fashion on the distributed storage servers. These imbalanced access patterns among storage nodes are caused because a). unlike conventional parallel file system using striping policies to evenly distribute data among storage nodes, data-intensive file systems such as HDFS store each data unit, referred to as chunk or block file, with several copies based on a relative random policy, which can result in an uneven data distribution among storage nodes; b). based on the data retrieval policy in HDFS, the more data a storage node contains, the higher the probability that the storage node could be selected to serve the data. Therefore, on the nodes serving multiple chunk files, the data requests from different processes/executors will compete for shared resources such as hard disk head and network bandwidth. Because of this, the makespan of the entire program could be significantly prolonged and the overall I/O performance will degrade. The first part of my dissertation seeks to address aspects of these problems by creating an I/O middleware system and designing matching-based algorithms to optimize data access in parallel big data processing. To address the problem of remote data movement, we develop an I/O middleware system, called SLAM, which allows MPI-based analysis and visualization programs to benefit from locality read, i.e, each MPI process can access its required data from a local or nearby storage node. This can greatly improve the execution performance by reducing the amount of data movement over network. Furthermore, to address the problem of imbalanced data access, we propose a method called Opass, which models the data read requests that are issued by parallel applications to cluster nodes as a graph data structure where edges weights encode the demands of load capacity. We then employ matching-based algorithms to map processes to data to achieve data access in a balanced fashion. The final part of my dissertation focuses on optimizing sub-dataset analyses in parallel big data processing. Our proposed methods can benefit different analysis applications with various computational requirements and the experiments on different cluster testbeds show their applicability and scalability

Modeling and scheduling heterogeneous multi-core architectures

Om de prestatie van toekomstige processors en processorarchitecturen te evalueren wordt vaak gebruik gemaakt van een simulator die het gedrag en de prestatie van de processor modelleert. De prestatie bepalen van de uitvoering van een computerprogramma op een gegeven processorarchitectuur m.b.v. een simulator duurt echter vele grootteordes langer dan de werkelijke uitvoeringstijd. Dit beperkt in belangrijke mate de hoeveelheid experimenten die gedaan kunnen worden. In dit doctoraatswerk werd het Multi-Program Performance Model (MPPM) ontwikkeld, een innovatief alternatief voor traditionele simulatie, dat het mogelijk maakt om tot 100.000x sneller een processorconfiguratie te evalueren. MPPM laat ons toe om nooit geziene exploraties te doen. Gebruik makend van dit raamwerk hebben we aangetoond dat de taakplanning cruciaal is om heterogene meerkernige processors optimaal te benutten. Vervolgens werd een nieuwe manier voorgesteld om op een schaalbare manier de taakplanning uit te voeren, namelijk Performance Impact Estimation (PIE). Tijdens de uitvoering van een draad op een gegeven processorkern schatten we de prestatie op een ander type kern op basis van eenvoudig op te meten prestatiemetrieken. Zo beschikken we op elk moment over alle nodige informatie om een efficiënte taakplanning te doen. Dit laat ons bovendien toe te optimaliseren voor verschillende criteria zoals uitvoeringstijd, doorvoersnelheid of fairness

Extreme scale parallel NBody algorithm with event driven constraint based execution model

Traditional scientific applications such as Computational Fluid Dynamics, Partial Differential Equations based numerical methods (like Finite Difference Methods, Finite Element Methods) achieve sufficient efficiency on state of the art high performance computing systems and have been widely studied / implemented using conventional programming models. For emerging application domains such as Graph applications scalability and efficiency is significantly constrained by the conventional systems and their supporting programming models. Furthermore technology trends like multicore, manycore, heterogeneous system architectures are introducing new challenges and possibilities. Emerging technologies are requiring a rethinking of approaches to more effectively expose the underlying parallelism to the applications and the end-users. This thesis explores the space of effective parallel execution of ephemeral graphs that are dynamically generated. The standard particle based simulation, solved using the Barnes-Hut algorithm is chosen to exemplify the dynamic workloads. In this thesis the workloads are expressed using sequential execution semantics, a conventional parallel programming model - shared memory semantics and semantics of an innovative execution model designed for efficient scalable performance towards Exascale computing called ParalleX. The main outcomes of this research are parallel processing of dynamic ephemeral workloads, enabling dynamic load balancing during runtime, and using advanced semantics for exposing parallelism in scaling constrained applications

Locality-aware scientific workflow engine for fast-evolving spatiotemporal sensor data, A

2017 Spring.Includes bibliographical references.Discerning knowledge from voluminous data involves a series of data manipulation steps. Scientists typically compose and execute workflows for these steps using scientific workflow management systems (SWfMSs). SWfMSs have been developed for several research communities including but not limited to bioinformatics, biology, astronomy, computational science, and physics. Parallel execution of workflows has been widely employed in SWfMSs by exploiting the storage and computing resources of grid and cloud services. However, none of these systems have been tailored for the needs of spatiotemporal analytics on real-time sensor data with high arrival rates. This thesis demonstrates the development and evaluation of a target-oriented workflow model that enables a user to specify dependencies among the workflow components, including data availability. The underlying spatiotemporal data dispersion and indexing scheme provides fast data search and retrieval to plan and execute computations comprising the workflow. This work includes a scheduling algorithm that targets minimizing data movement across machines while ensuring fair and efficient resource allocation among multiple users. The study includes empirical evaluations performed on the Google cloud

Architecting Data Centers for High Efficiency and Low Latency

Modern data centers, housing remarkably powerful computational capacity, are built in massive scales and consume a huge amount of energy. The energy consumption of data centers has mushroomed from virtually nothing to about three percent of the global electricity supply in the last decade, and will continuously grow. Unfortunately, a significant fraction of this energy consumption is wasted due to the inefficiency of current data center architectures, and one of the key reasons behind this inefficiency is the stringent response latency requirements of the user-facing services hosted in these data centers such as web search and social networks. To deliver such low response latency, data center operators often have to overprovision resources to handle high peaks in user load and unexpected load spikes, resulting in low efficiency. This dissertation investigates data center architecture designs that reconcile high system efficiency and low response latency. To increase the efficiency, we propose techniques that understand both microarchitectural-level resource sharing and system-level resource usage dynamics to enable highly efficient co-locations of latency-critical services and low-priority batch workloads. We investigate the resource sharing on real-system simultaneous multithreading (SMT) processors to enable SMT co-locations by precisely predicting the performance interference. We then leverage historical resource usage patterns to further optimize the task scheduling algorithm and data placement policy to improve the efficiency of workload co-locations. Moreover, we introduce methodologies to better manage the response latency by automatically attributing the source of tail latency to low-level architectural and system configurations in both offline load testing environment and online production environment. We design and develop a response latency evaluation framework at microsecond-level precision for data center applications, with which we construct statistical inference procedures to attribute the source of tail latency. Finally, we present an approach that proactively enacts carefully designed causal inference micro-experiments to diagnose the root causes of response latency anomalies, and automatically correct them to reduce the response latency.PHDComputer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/144144/1/yunqi_1.pd

Virtual Cluster Management for Analysis of Geographically Distributed and Immovable Data

Thesis (Ph.D.) - Indiana University, Informatics and Computing, 2015Scenarios exist in the era of Big Data where computational analysis needs to utilize widely distributed and remote compute clusters, especially when the data sources are sensitive or extremely large, and thus unable to move. A large dataset in Malaysia could be ecologically sensitive, for instance, and unable to be moved outside the country boundaries. Controlling an analysis experiment in this virtual cluster setting can be difficult on multiple levels: with setup and control, with managing behavior of the virtual cluster, and with interoperability issues across the compute clusters. Further, datasets can be distributed among clusters, or even across data centers, so that it becomes critical to utilize data locality information to optimize the performance of data-intensive jobs. Finally, datasets are increasingly sensitive and tied to certain administrative boundaries, though once the data has been processed, the aggregated or statistical result can be shared across the boundaries. This dissertation addresses management and control of a widely distributed virtual cluster having sensitive or otherwise immovable data sets through a controller. The Virtual Cluster Controller (VCC) gives control back to the researcher. It creates virtual clusters across multiple cloud platforms. In recognition of sensitive data, it can establish a single network overlay over widely distributed clusters. We define a novel class of data, notably immovable data that we call "pinned data", where the data is treated as a first-class citizen instead of being moved to where needed. We draw from our earlier work with a hierarchical data processing model, Hierarchical MapReduce (HMR), to process geographically distributed data, some of which are pinned data. The applications implemented in HMR use extended MapReduce model where computations are expressed as three functions: Map, Reduce, and GlobalReduce. Further, by facilitating information sharing among resources, applications, and data, the overall performance is improved. Experimental results show that the overhead of VCC is minimum. The HMR outperforms traditional MapReduce model while processing a particular class of applications. The evaluations also show that information sharing between resources and application through the VCC shortens the hierarchical data processing time, as well satisfying the constraints on the pinned data