Towards Efficient Locality Aware Parallel Data Stream Processing

Abstract: Parallel data processing and parallel streaming systems become quite popular. They are employed in various domains such as real-time signal processing, OLAP database systems, or high performance data extraction. One of the key components of these systems is the task scheduler which plans and executes tasks spawned by the application on available CPU cores. The multiprocessor systems and CPU architecture of the day become quite complex, which makes the task scheduling a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a novel task scheduling strategy for parallel data stream systems, that reflects many technical issues of the current hardware. In addition, we have implemented a NUMA aware memory allocator that improves data locality in NUMA systems. The proposed task scheduler combined with the new memory allocator achieve up to 3× speed up on a NUMA system and up to 10% speed up on an older SMP system with respect to the unoptimized versions of the scheduler and allocator. Many of the ideas implemented in our parallel framework may be adopted for task scheduling in other domains that focus on different priorities or employ additional constraints

A Taxonomy of Data Grids for Distributed Data Sharing, Management and Processing

Data Grids have been adopted as the platform for scientific communities that need to share, access, transport, process and manage large data collections distributed worldwide. They combine high-end computing technologies with high-performance networking and wide-area storage management techniques. In this paper, we discuss the key concepts behind Data Grids and compare them with other data sharing and distribution paradigms such as content delivery networks, peer-to-peer networks and distributed databases. We then provide comprehensive taxonomies that cover various aspects of architecture, data transportation, data replication and resource allocation and scheduling. Finally, we map the proposed taxonomy to various Data Grid systems not only to validate the taxonomy but also to identify areas for future exploration. Through this taxonomy, we aim to categorise existing systems to better understand their goals and their methodology. This would help evaluate their applicability for solving similar problems. This taxonomy also provides a "gap analysis" of this area through which researchers can potentially identify new issues for investigation. Finally, we hope that the proposed taxonomy and mapping also helps to provide an easy way for new practitioners to understand this complex area of research.Comment: 46 pages, 16 figures, Technical Repor