16,247 research outputs found
Datacenter Traffic Control: Understanding Techniques and Trade-offs
Datacenters provide cost-effective and flexible access to scalable compute
and storage resources necessary for today's cloud computing needs. A typical
datacenter is made up of thousands of servers connected with a large network
and usually managed by one operator. To provide quality access to the variety
of applications and services hosted on datacenters and maximize performance, it
deems necessary to use datacenter networks effectively and efficiently.
Datacenter traffic is often a mix of several classes with different priorities
and requirements. This includes user-generated interactive traffic, traffic
with deadlines, and long-running traffic. To this end, custom transport
protocols and traffic management techniques have been developed to improve
datacenter network performance.
In this tutorial paper, we review the general architecture of datacenter
networks, various topologies proposed for them, their traffic properties,
general traffic control challenges in datacenters and general traffic control
objectives. The purpose of this paper is to bring out the important
characteristics of traffic control in datacenters and not to survey all
existing solutions (as it is virtually impossible due to massive body of
existing research). We hope to provide readers with a wide range of options and
factors while considering a variety of traffic control mechanisms. We discuss
various characteristics of datacenter traffic control including management
schemes, transmission control, traffic shaping, prioritization, load balancing,
multipathing, and traffic scheduling. Next, we point to several open challenges
as well as new and interesting networking paradigms. At the end of this paper,
we briefly review inter-datacenter networks that connect geographically
dispersed datacenters which have been receiving increasing attention recently
and pose interesting and novel research problems.Comment: Accepted for Publication in IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial
Understanding and responding when things go wrong: key principles for primary care educators
Learning from events with unwanted outcomes is an important part of
workplace based education and providing evidence for medical appraisal
and revalidation. It has been suggested that adopting a ‘systems approach’
could enhance learning and effective change. We believe the following key
principles should be understood by all healthcare staff, especially those
with a role in developing and delivering educational content for safety and
improvement in primary care.
When things go wrong, professional accountability involves accepting there
has been a problem, apologising if necessary and committing to learn and
change. This is easier in a ‘Just Culture’ where wilful disregard of safe
practice is not tolerated but where decisions commensurate with training
and experience do not result in blame and punishment. People usually
attempt to achieve successful outcomes, but when things go wrong the
contribution of hindsight and attribution bias as well as a lack of
understanding of conditions and available information (local rationality) can
lead to inappropriately blame ‘human error’. System complexity makes
reduction into component parts difficult; thus attempting to ‘find-and-fix’
malfunctioning components may not always be a valid approach. Finally,
performance variability by staff is often needed to meet demands or cope
with resource constraints.
We believe understanding these core principles is a necessary precursor to
adopting a ‘systems approach’ that can increase learning and reduce the
damaging effects on morale when ‘human error’ is blamed. This may
result in ‘human error’ becoming the starting point of an investigation and
not the endpoint
The Scalability-Efficiency/Maintainability-Portability Trade-off in Simulation Software Engineering: Examples and a Preliminary Systematic Literature Review
Large-scale simulations play a central role in science and the industry.
Several challenges occur when building simulation software, because simulations
require complex software developed in a dynamic construction process. That is
why simulation software engineering (SSE) is emerging lately as a research
focus. The dichotomous trade-off between scalability and efficiency (SE) on the
one hand and maintainability and portability (MP) on the other hand is one of
the core challenges. We report on the SE/MP trade-off in the context of an
ongoing systematic literature review (SLR). After characterizing the issue of
the SE/MP trade-off using two examples from our own research, we (1) review the
33 identified articles that assess the trade-off, (2) summarize the proposed
solutions for the trade-off, and (3) discuss the findings for SSE and future
work. Overall, we see evidence for the SE/MP trade-off and first solution
approaches. However, a strong empirical foundation has yet to be established;
general quantitative metrics and methods supporting software developers in
addressing the trade-off have to be developed. We foresee considerable future
work in SSE across scientific communities.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures. Accepted for presentation at the Fourth
International Workshop on Software Engineering for High Performance Computing
in Computational Science and Engineering (SEHPCCSE 2016
Learning Anytime Predictions in Neural Networks via Adaptive Loss Balancing
This work considers the trade-off between accuracy and test-time
computational cost of deep neural networks (DNNs) via \emph{anytime}
predictions from auxiliary predictions. Specifically, we optimize auxiliary
losses jointly in an \emph{adaptive} weighted sum, where the weights are
inversely proportional to average of each loss. Intuitively, this balances the
losses to have the same scale. We demonstrate theoretical considerations that
motivate this approach from multiple viewpoints, including connecting it to
optimizing the geometric mean of the expectation of each loss, an objective
that ignores the scale of losses. Experimentally, the adaptive weights induce
more competitive anytime predictions on multiple recognition data-sets and
models than non-adaptive approaches including weighing all losses equally. In
particular, anytime neural networks (ANNs) can achieve the same accuracy faster
using adaptive weights on a small network than using static constant weights on
a large one. For problems with high performance saturation, we also show a
sequence of exponentially deepening ANNscan achieve near-optimal anytime
results at any budget, at the cost of a const fraction of extra computation
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