Making the case for reforming the I/O software stack of extreme-scale systems

This work was supported in part by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Advanced Scientific Computing Research, under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231. This research has been partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under grant TIN2010-16497 “Input/Output techniques for distributed and high-performance computing environments”. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement number 328582

Engenharia de Resiliência

This thesis presents a study of a new discipline called Chaos Engineering and its approaches, that help to verify the correct behavior of a system and to discover new information about it, through chaos experiments like the shutdown of a machine or the simulation of latency in the network connections between applications. The case study was carried out at the company Mindera, to verify and improve the resilience to failures of a client’s project. Initially the chaos maturity of the project within the Chaos Maturity Model wasin the first levels and it was necessary to increase its sophistication and adoption by conducting experiments to test and improve the resilience. The cloud environment that the project uses, and the architecture is explained to contextualize the components that the experiments will use and test. Different alternatives to test disaster recovery plans are compared as well as the differences between the use of a test environment and the production environment. The value of carrying out experiments for the client project is described, as well as the identification of their value proposal. In the end, the analysis of the different chaos tools is performed using the TOPSIS method. The four performed experiments test the system's resilience to failure of a database’s primary node, the impact of latency in the network connections between different components, the system's reaction to the exhaustion of physical resources of a machine and finally the global test of a system's resiliency in the face of a server failure. After the execution, the experiences were evaluated by company experts. In the end, the conclusions about the work developed are presented. The experiments carried out were classified as important for the project. A problem was found after in the latency introduction experiment and after changing the application’s code, the system reaction was positive, and the number of responses was increased.Esta tese apresenta um estudo de uma nova disciplina chamada Chaos Engineering e as suas abordagens, que ajudam a verificar o correto funcionamento e a descoberta de novas informações acerca de um sistema através de realização de experiências como o desligar de uma máquina ou a simulação de latência nas ligações de rede entre aplicações. O caso de estudo foi realizado na empresa Mindera, dentro de um projeto cliente, para verificar e melhorar a sua resiliência a falhas. Inicialmente a maturidade de caos do projeto dentro do Chaos Maturity Model encontra-se nos primeiros níveis e tornou-se necessário aumentar a sua sofisticação e adoção através da realização de experiências para testar e melhorar a resiliência. O ambiente de cloud que o projeto usa e a sua arquitetura é explicada para contextualizar os componentes que as experiências vão usar e testar. As diferentes alternativas de testar planos de recuperação a desastres são comparadas, assim como, as diferenças entre a utilização do ambiente de testes e de produção. O valor da realização de experiências para o projeto cliente é descrito, assim como a identificação da sua proposta de valor. No final, a análise das diferentes ferramentas de caos é realizada recorrendo ao método TOPSIS. As quatro experiências executadas testam a resiliência do sistema perante a falha de um nó primário de uma base de dados, o impacto da latência nas ligações de rede entre diferentes componentes, a reação do sistema perante a exaustão de recursos físicos de uma máquina e por último o teste global da resiliência de um sistema perante a falha de um servidor. As experiências são posteriormente avaliadas por experts da empresa. No final, as conclusões acerca do trabalho desenvolvido são apresentadas. As experiências realizadas foram classificadas como importantes para o projeto. Um problema foi encontrado na experiência de introdução de latência e após a alteração do seu código, a reação do sistema foi positiva e o número de respostas aumentou

Pitt Momentum Fund 2020 Overview

In the 2019–2020 academic year, Provost and Senior Vice Chancellor Ann E. Cudd and Senior Vice Chancellor for Research (SVCR) Rob A. Rutenbar have collaborated to enhance and streamline internal funding opportunities for faculty research while continuing to support high-quality research, scholarship, and creative endeavors. The result is a jointly funded large-scale research development fund—the Pitt Momentum Funds—which restructures the University’s suite of internal funding programs (Central Research Development Fund, Social Science Research Initiative, and Special initiative to Promote Scholarly Activities in the Humanities) and adds a new SVCR/Provost Fund to provide allocations for research seeding, teaming, and scaling grants. The new $920,000 annual funding model provides large-scale, transformative scholarship support for interdisciplinary teams of faculty from at least three schools with two new one-year planning (or “teaming”) grants of$60,000, and two new two-year scaling grants at $400,000. This new suite of funds—which is new funding and does not reduce overall funding—will help advance Pitt’s goal to engage in research of impact. The new structure for awards includes three tiers: Seeding Grants—one-year term with an award cap of$16,000 plus (2,000 supplements are available for specific cases); awards are made in four tracks: STEM Health & Life Science Arts & Humanities Social Sciences, which includes business, policy, law, education, and social work Preventing Sexual Misconduct** (All faculty, including School of Medicine, are eligible to apply to this track) Seeding grants support significant and innovative scholarship by individual or groups of faculty at all ranks at the University of Pittsburgh, with a particular focus on early career faculty and areas where external funding is extremely limited. Teaming Grants—one-year term with an award cap of 60,000. Teaming grants support the formation of new multi-disciplinary collaborations to successfully pursue large-scale external funding. Scaling Grants—two-year term with an award cap of $400,000. Scaling grants enable multi-disciplinary teams to competitively scale their research efforts in targeted pursuit of large-scale external funding. More information on eligibility, application processes, evaluation criteria, exclusions, and participation requirements is available through Pitt’s Office of Sponsored Programs. The application can be accessed at the Competition Space