A Taxonomy of Workflow Management Systems for Grid Computing

With the advent of Grid and application technologies, scientists and engineers are building more and more complex applications to manage and process large data sets, and execute scientific experiments on distributed resources. Such application scenarios require means for composing and executing complex workflows. Therefore, many efforts have been made towards the development of workflow management systems for Grid computing. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy that characterizes and classifies various approaches for building and executing workflows on Grids. We also survey several representative Grid workflow systems developed by various projects world-wide to demonstrate the comprehensiveness of the taxonomy. The taxonomy not only highlights the design and engineering similarities and differences of state-of-the-art in Grid workflow systems, but also identifies the areas that need further research.Comment: 29 pages, 15 figure

A Survey of Fault-Tolerance Techniques for Embedded Systems from the Perspective of Power, Energy, and Thermal Issues

The relentless technology scaling has provided a significant increase in processor performance, but on the other hand, it has led to adverse impacts on system reliability. In particular, technology scaling increases the processor susceptibility to radiation-induced transient faults. Moreover, technology scaling with the discontinuation of Dennard scaling increases the power densities, thereby temperatures, on the chip. High temperature, in turn, accelerates transistor aging mechanisms, which may ultimately lead to permanent faults on the chip. To assure a reliable system operation, despite these potential reliability concerns, fault-tolerance techniques have emerged. Specifically, fault-tolerance techniques employ some kind of redundancies to satisfy specific reliability requirements. However, the integration of fault-tolerance techniques into real-time embedded systems complicates preserving timing constraints. As a remedy, many task mapping/scheduling policies have been proposed to consider the integration of fault-tolerance techniques and enforce both timing and reliability guarantees for real-time embedded systems. More advanced techniques aim additionally at minimizing power and energy while at the same time satisfying timing and reliability constraints. Recently, some scheduling techniques have started to tackle a new challenge, which is the temperature increase induced by employing fault-tolerance techniques. These emerging techniques aim at satisfying temperature constraints besides timing and reliability constraints. This paper provides an in-depth survey of the emerging research efforts that exploit fault-tolerance techniques while considering timing, power/energy, and temperature from the real-time embedded systems’ design perspective. In particular, the task mapping/scheduling policies for fault-tolerance real-time embedded systems are reviewed and classified according to their considered goals and constraints. Moreover, the employed fault-tolerance techniques, application models, and hardware models are considered as additional dimensions of the presented classification. Lastly, this survey gives deep insights into the main achievements and shortcomings of the existing approaches and highlights the most promising ones

Multi-criteria and satisfaction oriented scheduling for hybrid distributed computing infrastructures

International audienceAssembling and simultaneously using different types of distributed computing infrastructures (DCI) like Grids and Clouds is an increasingly common situation. Because infrastructures are characterized by different attributes such as price, performance, trust, greenness, the task scheduling problem becomes more complex and challenging. In this paper we present the design for a fault-tolerant and trust-aware scheduler, which allows to execute Bag-of-Tasks applications on elastic and hybrid DCI, following user-defined scheduling strategies. Our approach, named Promethee scheduler, combines a pull-based scheduler with multi-criteria Promethee decision making algorithm. Because multi-criteria scheduling leads to the multiplication of the possible scheduling strategies, we propose SOFT, a methodology that allows to find the optimal scheduling strategies given a set of application requirements. The validation of this method is performed with a simulator that fully implements the Promethee scheduler and recreates an hybrid DCI environment including Internet Desktop Grid, Cloud and Best Effort Grid based on real failure traces. A set of experiments shows that the Promethee scheduler is able to maximize user satisfaction expressed accordingly to three distinct criteria: price, expected completion time and trust, while maximizing the infrastructure useful employment from the resources owner point of view. Finally, we present an optimization which bounds the computation time of the Promethee algorithm, making realistic the possible integration of the scheduler to a wide range of resource management software

Programming with process groups: Group and multicast semantics

Process groups are a natural tool for distributed programming and are increasingly important in distributed computing environments. Discussed here is a new architecture that arose from an effort to simplify Isis process group semantics. The findings include a refined notion of how the clients of a group should be treated, what the properties of a multicast primitive should be when systems contain large numbers of overlapping groups, and a new construct called the causality domain. A system based on this architecture is now being implemented in collaboration with the Chorus and Mach projects

Ada (trademark) projects at NASA. Runtime environment issues and recommendations

Ada practitioners should use this document to discuss and establish common short term requirements for Ada runtime environments. The major current Ada runtime environment issues are identified through the analysis of some of the Ada efforts at NASA and other research centers. The runtime environment characteristics of major compilers are compared while alternate runtime implementations are reviewed. Modifications and extensions to the Ada Language Reference Manual to address some of these runtime issues are proposed. Three classes of projects focusing on the most critical runtime features of Ada are recommended, including a range of immediately feasible full scale Ada development projects. Also, a list of runtime features and procurement issues is proposed for consideration by the vendors, contractors and the government

Saber: window-based hybrid stream processing for heterogeneous architectures

Modern servers have become heterogeneous, often combining multicore CPUs with many-core GPGPUs. Such heterogeneous architectures have the potential to improve the performance of data-intensive stream processing applications, but they are not supported by current relational stream processing engines. For an engine to exploit a heterogeneous architecture, it must execute streaming SQL queries with sufficient data-parallelism to fully utilise all available heterogeneous processors, and decide how to use each in the most effective way. It must do this while respecting the semantics of streaming SQL queries, in particular with regard to window handling. We describe SABER, a hybrid high-performance relational stream processing engine for CPUs and GPGPUs. SABER executes windowbased streaming SQL queries in a data-parallel fashion using all available CPU and GPGPU cores. Instead of statically assigning query operators to heterogeneous processors, SABER employs a new adaptive heterogeneous lookahead scheduling strategy, which increases the share of queries executing on the processor that yields the highest performance. To hide data movement costs, SABER pipelines the transfer of stream data between different memory types and the CPU/GPGPU. Our experimental comparison against state-ofthe-art engines shows that SABER increases processing throughput while maintaining low latency for a wide range of streaming SQL queries with small and large windows sizes

Health-aware model predictive control including fault-tolerant capabilities for drinking water transport networks

© 2021 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting /republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other worksThis paper presents a health-aware Model Predictive Control (MPC) including fault-tolerant capabilities for drinking water transport networks. When a fault has occurred, the predictive controller must be redesigned to deal with the fault. This is done by considering the system reliability that is incorporated into the MPC model. The inclusion of components and system reliability in the MPC model is done through the Linear Parameter Varying (LPV) modelling approach with the aim of maximizing the availability of the system by considering system reliability. As a result, the MPC design is modified by considering the reliability model such that additionally to achieve the best achievable performance after the fault, the controller try to preserve the remaining useful life. The solution to the optimization problem related to the MPC problem is achieved by solving a series of Quadratic Programming (QP) problems thanks to the proposed LPV formulation. The proposed approach is applied to a part of a real drinking water transport network of Barcelona for demonstrating the performance of the method.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Design of a fault tolerant airborne digital computer. Volume 1: Architecture

This volume is concerned with the architecture of a fault tolerant digital computer for an advanced commercial aircraft. All of the computations of the aircraft, including those presently carried out by analogue techniques, are to be carried out in this digital computer. Among the important qualities of the computer are the following: (1) The capacity is to be matched to the aircraft environment. (2) The reliability is to be selectively matched to the criticality and deadline requirements of each of the computations. (3) The system is to be readily expandable. contractible, and (4) The design is to appropriate to post 1975 technology. Three candidate architectures are discussed and assessed in terms of the above qualities. Of the three candidates, a newly conceived architecture, Software Implemented Fault Tolerance (SIFT), provides the best match to the above qualities. In addition SIFT is particularly simple and believable. The other candidates, Bus Checker System (BUCS), also newly conceived in this project, and the Hopkins multiprocessor are potentially more efficient than SIFT in the use of redundancy, but otherwise are not as attractive