Elasca: Workload-Aware Elastic Scalability for Partition Based Database Systems

Providing the ability to increase or decrease allocated resources on demand as the transactional load varies is essential for database management systems (DBMS) deployed on today's computing platforms, such as the cloud. The need to maintain consistency of the database, at very large scales, while providing high performance and reliability makes elasticity particularly challenging. In this thesis, we exploit data partitioning as a way to provide elastic DBMS scalability. We assert that the flexibility provided by a partitioned, shared-nothing parallel DBMS can be used to implement elasticity. Our idea is to start with a small number of servers that manage all the partitions, and to elastically scale out by dynamically adding new servers and redistributing database partitions among these servers as the load varies. Implementing this approach requires (a) efficient mechanisms for addition/removal of servers and migration of partitions, and (b) policies to efficiently determine the optimal placement of partitions on the given servers as well as plans for partition migration. This thesis presents Elasca, a system that implements both these features in an existing shared-nothing DBMS (namely VoltDB) to provide automatic elastic scalability. Elasca consists of a mechanism for enabling elastic scalability, and a workload-aware optimizer for determining optimal partition placement and migration plans. Our optimizer minimizes computing resources required and balances load effectively without compromising system performance, even in the presence of variations in intensity and skew of the load. The results of our experiments show that Elasca is able to achieve performance close to a fully provisioned system while saving 35% resources on average. Furthermore, Elasca's workload-aware optimizer performs up to 79% less data movement than a greedy approach to resource minimization, and also balance load much more effectively

Revisiting Actor Programming in C++

The actor model of computation has gained significant popularity over the last decade. Its high level of abstraction makes it appealing for concurrent applications in parallel and distributed systems. However, designing a real-world actor framework that subsumes full scalability, strong reliability, and high resource efficiency requires many conceptual and algorithmic additives to the original model. In this paper, we report on designing and building CAF, the "C++ Actor Framework". CAF targets at providing a concurrent and distributed native environment for scaling up to very large, high-performance applications, and equally well down to small constrained systems. We present the key specifications and design concepts---in particular a message-transparent architecture, type-safe message interfaces, and pattern matching facilities---that make native actors a viable approach for many robust, elastic, and highly distributed developments. We demonstrate the feasibility of CAF in three scenarios: first for elastic, upscaling environments, second for including heterogeneous hardware like GPGPUs, and third for distributed runtime systems. Extensive performance evaluations indicate ideal runtime behaviour for up to 64 cores at very low memory footprint, or in the presence of GPUs. In these tests, CAF continuously outperforms the competing actor environments Erlang, Charm++, SalsaLite, Scala, ActorFoundry, and even the OpenMPI.Comment: 33 page

Management control of supplier relationships in manufacturing: a case study in the automotive industry.

This paper studies management control design of supplier relationships in manufacturing, a supply chain phase currently under-explored. Compared to supplier relations during procurement and R&D, which research found to be governed by a combination of formal and informal controls, supplier relations in manufacturing are more formal, so that they could be governed by more formal and less informal controls. To refine the management control system and influencing contingencies, we propose a theoretical framework specifically adapted for the manufacturing stage. This framework is investigated by an in depth case study of the supplier management control of a Volvo Cars production facility. We identify three types of suppliers visualizing the associations in the framework and illustrating the framework’s explicative power in (automotive) manufacturing. Furthermore, the case contradicts that supplier relations in the manufacturing phase are governed by little informal control, because the automaker highly values the role of trust building and social pressure. Most notably, a structured supplier team functions as a clan and establishes informal control among participating suppliers, which strengthens the automaker’s control on dyadic supplier relations.management control; supplier relationships; manufacturing; contingency theory; case research;

The parallel event loop model and runtime: a parallel programming model and runtime system for safe event-based parallel programming

Recent trends in programming models for server-side development have shown an increasing popularity of event-based single- threaded programming models based on the combination of dynamic languages such as JavaScript and event-based runtime systems for asynchronous I/O management such as Node.JS. Reasons for the success of such models are the simplicity of the single-threaded event-based programming model as well as the growing popularity of the Cloud as a deployment platform for Web applications. Unfortunately, the popularity of single-threaded models comes at the price of performance and scalability, as single-threaded event-based models present limitations when parallel processing is needed, and traditional approaches to concurrency such as threads and locks don't play well with event-based systems. This dissertation proposes a programming model and a runtime system to overcome such limitations by enabling single-threaded event-based applications with support for speculative parallel execution. The model, called Parallel Event Loop, has the goal of bringing parallel execution to the domain of single-threaded event-based programming without relaxing the main characteristics of the single-threaded model, and therefore providing developers with the impression of a safe, single-threaded, runtime. Rather than supporting only pure single-threaded programming, however, the parallel event loop can also be used to derive safe, high-level, parallel programming models characterized by a strong compatibility with single-threaded runtimes. We describe three distinct implementations of speculative runtimes enabling the parallel execution of event-based applications. The first implementation we describe is a pessimistic runtime system based on locks to implement speculative parallelization. The second and the third implementations are based on two distinct optimistic runtimes using software transactional memory. Each of the implementations supports the parallelization of applications written using an asynchronous single-threaded programming style, and each of them enables applications to benefit from parallel execution

The parallel event loop model and runtime: a parallel programming model and runtime system for safe event-based parallel programming

Recent trends in programming models for server-side development have shown an increasing popularity of event-based single- threaded programming models based on the combination of dynamic languages such as JavaScript and event-based runtime systems for asynchronous I/O management such as Node.JS. Reasons for the success of such models are the simplicity of the single-threaded event-based programming model as well as the growing popularity of the Cloud as a deployment platform for Web applications. Unfortunately, the popularity of single-threaded models comes at the price of performance and scalability, as single-threaded event-based models present limitations when parallel processing is needed, and traditional approaches to concurrency such as threads and locks don't play well with event-based systems. This dissertation proposes a programming model and a runtime system to overcome such limitations by enabling single-threaded event-based applications with support for speculative parallel execution. The model, called Parallel Event Loop, has the goal of bringing parallel execution to the domain of single-threaded event-based programming without relaxing the main characteristics of the single-threaded model, and therefore providing developers with the impression of a safe, single-threaded, runtime. Rather than supporting only pure single-threaded programming, however, the parallel event loop can also be used to derive safe, high-level, parallel programming models characterized by a strong compatibility with single-threaded runtimes. We describe three distinct implementations of speculative runtimes enabling the parallel execution of event-based applications. The first implementation we describe is a pessimistic runtime system based on locks to implement speculative parallelization. The second and the third implementations are based on two distinct optimistic runtimes using software transactional memory. Each of the implementations supports the parallelization of applications written using an asynchronous single-threaded programming style, and each of them enables applications to benefit from parallel execution

Future school services, 'Global Solutions' : ESRC Seminar 4 Proceedings

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Self-configured Elastic Database with Deep Q-Learning Approach

Elastic databases have grown in popularity over conventional databases in recent years due to their ability to be allocated with sufficient capacity for peak load. Especially with the support of the cloud platform, which provides flexible resources and low cost, elastic databases on the cloud show their excellent potential in scalability, flexibility, and accessibility. However, the interaction between the cloud layers of virtual machines (VMs) and databases further complicates the issue of cloud configuration to adapt to dynamic workloads. In this paper, I explore a framework for a self-configured elastic database that can optimize the cloud configuration and adaptively allocate resources under the constraints of databases\u27 Service Level Agreement (SLA). At the core of the framework is a Deep Q learning approach, which combines the advantages of Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Deep Learning (DL). The framework is built on Amazon Web Service (AWS)\u27s cloud environment and uses MySQL database for its high availability replication mechanism. Experimental results on the TPC-W benchmark demonstrate that with the implementation of Deep Q learning, the elastic database reduces SLA violation by more than 90\%, in the response to the steep slope of workload change