1,990 research outputs found
Network emulation focusing on QoS-Oriented satellite communication
This chapter proposes network emulation basics and a complete case study of QoS-oriented Satellite Communication
Assessing the Utility of a Personal Desktop Cluster
The computer workstation, introduced by Sun Microsystems in 1982, was the tool of
choice for scientists and engineers as an interactive computing environment for the development
of scientific codes. However, by the mid-1990s, the performance of workstations
began to lag behind high-end commodity PCs. This, coupled with the disappearance of
BSD-based operating systems in workstations and the emergence of Linux as an opensource
operating system for PCs, arguably led to the demise of the workstation as we
knew it.
Around the same time, computational scientists started to leverage PCs running
Linux to create a commodity-based (Beowulf) cluster that provided dedicated compute
cycles, i.e., supercomputing for the rest of us, as a cost-effective alternative to large
supercomputers, i.e., supercomputing for the few. However, as the cluster movement
has matured, with respect to cluster hardware and open-source software, these clusters
have become much more like their large-scale supercomputing brethren â a shared
datacenter resource that resides in a machine room.
Consequently, the above observations, when coupled with the ever-increasing performance
gap between the PC and cluster supercomputer, provide the motivation for a
personal desktop cluster workstation â a turnkey solution that provides an interactive and parallel computing environment with the approximate form factor of a Sun SPARCstation
1 âpizza boxâ workstation. In this paper, we present the hardware and software
architecture of such a solution as well as its prowess as a developmental platform for parallel codes. In short, imagine a 12-node personal desktop cluster that achieves 14 Gflops on Linpack but sips only 150-180 watts of power, resulting in a performance-power ratio that is over 300% better than our test SMP platform
Methods and design issues for next generation network-aware applications
Networks are becoming an essential component of modern cyberinfrastructure and this work describes methods of designing distributed applications for high-speed networks to improve application scalability, performance and capabilities. As the amount of data generated by scientific applications continues to grow, to be able to handle and process it, applications should be designed to use parallel, distributed resources and high-speed networks. For scalable application design developers should move away from the current component-based approach and implement instead an integrated, non-layered architecture where applications can use specialized low-level interfaces. The main focus of this research is on interactive, collaborative visualization of large datasets. This work describes how a visualization application can be improved through using distributed resources and high-speed network links to interactively visualize tens of gigabytes of data and handle terabyte datasets while maintaining high quality. The application supports interactive frame rates, high resolution, collaborative visualization and sustains remote I/O bandwidths of several Gbps (up to 30 times faster than local I/O). Motivated by the distributed visualization application, this work also researches remote data access systems. Because wide-area networks may have a high latency, the remote I/O system uses an architecture that effectively hides latency. Five remote data access architectures are analyzed and the results show that an architecture that combines bulk and pipeline processing is the best solution for high-throughput remote data access. The resulting system, also supporting high-speed transport protocols and configurable remote operations, is up to 400 times faster than a comparable existing remote data access system. Transport protocols are compared to understand which protocol can best utilize high-speed network connections, concluding that a rate-based protocol is the best solution, being 8 times faster than standard TCP. An HD-based remote teaching application experiment is conducted, illustrating the potential of network-aware applications in a production environment. Future research areas are presented, with emphasis on network-aware optimization, execution and deployment scenarios
Performance evaluation of an open distributed platform for realistic traffic generation
Network researchers have dedicated a notable part of their efforts
to the area of modeling traffic and to the implementation of efficient traffic
generators. We feel that there is a strong demand for traffic generators
capable to reproduce realistic traffic patterns according to theoretical
models and at the same time with high performance. This work presents an open
distributed platform for traffic generation that we called distributed
internet traffic generator (D-ITG), capable of producing traffic (network,
transport and application layer) at packet level and of accurately replicating
appropriate stochastic processes for both inter departure time (IDT) and
packet size (PS) random variables. We implemented two different versions of
our distributed generator. In the first one, a log server is in charge of
recording the information transmitted by senders and receivers and these
communications are based either on TCP or UDP. In the other one, senders and
receivers make use of the MPI library. In this work a complete performance
comparison among the centralized version and the two distributed versions of
D-ITG is presented
Cloud Computing and Big Data for Oil and Gas Industry Application in China
The oil and gas industry is a complex data-driven industry with compute-intensive, data-intensive and business-intensive features. Cloud computing and big data have a broad application prospect in the oil and gas industry. This research aims to highlight the cloud computing and big data issues and challenges from the informatization in oil and gas industry. In this paper, the distributed cloud storage architecture and its applications for seismic data of oil and gas industry are focused on first. Then,cloud desktop for oil and gas industry applications are also introduced in terms of efficiency, security and usability. Finally, big data architecture and security issues of oil and gas industry are analyzed. Cloud computing and big data architectures have advantages in many aspects, such as system scalability, reliability, and serviceability. This paper also provides a brief description for the future development of Cloud computing and big data in oil and gas industry. Cloud computing and big data can provide convenient information sharing and high quality service for oil and gas industry
The Design of a System Architecture for Mobile Multimedia Computers
This chapter discusses the system architecture of a portable computer, called Mobile Digital Companion, which provides support for handling multimedia applications energy efficiently. Because battery life is limited and battery weight is an important factor for the size and the weight of the Mobile Digital Companion, energy management plays a crucial role in the architecture. As the Companion must remain usable in a variety of environments, it has to be flexible and adaptable to various operating conditions. The Mobile Digital Companion has an unconventional architecture that saves energy by using system decomposition at different levels of the architecture and exploits locality of reference with dedicated, optimised modules. The approach is based on dedicated functionality and the extensive use of energy reduction techniques at all levels of system design. The system has an architecture with a general-purpose processor accompanied by a set of heterogeneous autonomous programmable modules, each providing an energy efficient implementation of dedicated tasks. A reconfigurable internal communication network switch exploits locality of reference and eliminates wasteful data copies
- âŠ