2,863 research outputs found
Many-Task Computing and Blue Waters
This report discusses many-task computing (MTC) generically and in the
context of the proposed Blue Waters systems, which is planned to be the largest
NSF-funded supercomputer when it begins production use in 2012. The aim of this
report is to inform the BW project about MTC, including understanding aspects
of MTC applications that can be used to characterize the domain and
understanding the implications of these aspects to middleware and policies.
Many MTC applications do not neatly fit the stereotypes of high-performance
computing (HPC) or high-throughput computing (HTC) applications. Like HTC
applications, by definition MTC applications are structured as graphs of
discrete tasks, with explicit input and output dependencies forming the graph
edges. However, MTC applications have significant features that distinguish
them from typical HTC applications. In particular, different engineering
constraints for hardware and software must be met in order to support these
applications. HTC applications have traditionally run on platforms such as
grids and clusters, through either workflow systems or parallel programming
systems. MTC applications, in contrast, will often demand a short time to
solution, may be communication intensive or data intensive, and may comprise
very short tasks. Therefore, hardware and software for MTC must be engineered
to support the additional communication and I/O and must minimize task dispatch
overheads. The hardware of large-scale HPC systems, with its high degree of
parallelism and support for intensive communication, is well suited for MTC
applications. However, HPC systems often lack a dynamic resource-provisioning
feature, are not ideal for task communication via the file system, and have an
I/O system that is not optimized for MTC-style applications. Hence, additional
software support is likely to be required to gain full benefit from the HPC
hardware
Hierarchical task allocation in robotic exploration
Autonomous robotic exploration has long been a topic of interest in robotics research. Robotic exploration promises the ability to explore otherwise unreachable or hostile environments. Autonomous exploration is particularly useful in distant or hostile environments in which real-time communication with a human controller may not be practical, such as deep sea or planetary exploration. In order to more effectively explore a large unknown area, multiple robots may be employed to work cooperatively. While cooperation among multiple robots allows for increased exploration potential, it also entails significantly more complex planning. This complex planning involves allocation of exploration tasks to the robots participating in the exploration. Task allocation for multi-agent systems has applications in a wide variety of fields, but specifically in robotics, it makes a level of autonomy possible that is difficult to achieve otherwise. Task allocation has been approached in a variety of ways, depending largely on the nature of the tasks considered. Some problems present very specific tasks, allowing task allocation algorithms for them to be very domain-specific. This thesis presents an analysis of various task allocation approaches that have been taken specifically for autonomous robotic exploration, and will present a new hierarchical market based approach. This new approach provides agents with a mechanism to form coalitions and to divide a coalition into smaller coalitions. The formation of new coalitions from larger coalitions to pursue multiple avenues of exploration forms an implicit hierarchy of goals as they are discovered
Agents in Bioinformatics
The scope of the Technical Forum Group (TFG) on Agents in Bioinformatics (BIOAGENTS) was to inspire collaboration between the agent and bioinformatics communities with the aim of creating an opportunity to propose a different (agent-based) approach to the development of computational frameworks both for data analysis in bioinformatics and for system modelling in computational biology. During the day, the participants examined the future of research on agents in bioinformatics primarily through 12 invited talks selected to cover the most relevant topics. From the discussions, it became clear that there are many perspectives to the field, ranging from bio-conceptual languages for agent-based simulation, to the definition of bio-ontology-based declarative languages for use by information agents, and to the use of Grid agents, each of which requires further exploration. The interactions between participants encouraged the development of applications that describe a way of creating agent-based simulation models of biological systems, starting from an hypothesis and inferring new knowledge (or relations) by mining and analysing the huge amount of public biological data. In this report we summarise and reflect on the presentations and discussions
Design and implementation of a multi-agent opportunistic grid computing platform
Opportunistic Grid Computing involves joining idle computing resources in enterprises into a converged high performance commodity infrastructure. The research described in this dissertation investigates the viability of public resource computing in offering a plethora of possibilities through seamless access to shared compute and storage resources. The research proposes and conceptualizes the Multi-Agent Opportunistic Grid (MAOG) solution in an Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) initiative to address some limitations prevalent in traditional distributed system implementations. Proof-of-concept software components based on JADE (Java Agent Development Framework) validated Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) as an important tool for provisioning of Opportunistic Grid Computing platforms. Exploration of agent technologies within the research context identified two key components which improve access to extended computer capabilities. The first component is a Mobile Agent (MA) compute component in which a group of agents interact to pool shared processor cycles. The compute component integrates dynamic resource identification and allocation strategies by incorporating the Contract Net Protocol (CNP) and rule based reasoning concepts. The second service is a MAS based storage component realized through disk mirroring and Google file-system’s chunking with atomic append storage techniques. This research provides a candidate Opportunistic Grid Computing platform design and implementation through the use of MAS. Experiments conducted validated the design and implementation of the compute and storage services. From results, support for processing user applications; resource identification and allocation; and rule based reasoning validated the MA compute component. A MAS based file-system that implements chunking optimizations was considered to be optimum based on evaluations. The findings from the undertaken experiments also validated the functional adequacy of the implementation, and show the suitability of MAS for provisioning of robust, autonomous, and intelligent platforms. The context of this research, ICT4D, provides a solution to optimizing and increasing the utilization of computing resources that are usually idle in these contexts
Parallel accelerated cyclic reduction preconditioner for three-dimensional elliptic PDEs with variable coefficients
We present a robust and scalable preconditioner for the solution of
large-scale linear systems that arise from the discretization of elliptic PDEs
amenable to rank compression. The preconditioner is based on hierarchical
low-rank approximations and the cyclic reduction method. The setup and
application phases of the preconditioner achieve log-linear complexity in
memory footprint and number of operations, and numerical experiments exhibit
good weak and strong scalability at large processor counts in a distributed
memory environment. Numerical experiments with linear systems that feature
symmetry and nonsymmetry, definiteness and indefiniteness, constant and
variable coefficients demonstrate the preconditioner applicability and
robustness. Furthermore, it is possible to control the number of iterations via
the accuracy threshold of the hierarchical matrix approximations and their
arithmetic operations, and the tuning of the admissibility condition parameter.
Together, these parameters allow for optimization of the memory requirements
and performance of the preconditioner.Comment: 24 pages, Elsevier Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics,
Dec 201
DRIVER Technology Watch Report
This report is part of the Discovery Workpackage (WP4) and is the third report out of four deliverables. The objective of this report is to give an overview of the latest technical developments in the world of digital repositories, digital libraries and beyond, in order to serve as theoretical and practical input for the technical DRIVER developments, especially those focused on enhanced publications. This report consists of two main parts, one part focuses on interoperability standards for enhanced publications, the other part consists of three subchapters, which give a landscape picture of current and surfacing technologies and communities crucial to DRIVER. These three subchapters contain the GRID, CRIS and LTP communities and technologies. Every chapter contains a theoretical explanation, followed by case studies and the outcomes and opportunities for DRIVER in this field
Collaborative Reuse of Streaming Dataflows in IoT Applications
Distributed Stream Processing Systems (DSPS) like Apache Storm and Spark
Streaming enable composition of continuous dataflows that execute persistently
over data streams. They are used by Internet of Things (IoT) applications to
analyze sensor data from Smart City cyber-infrastructure, and make active
utility management decisions. As the ecosystem of such IoT applications that
leverage shared urban sensor streams continue to grow, applications will
perform duplicate pre-processing and analytics tasks. This offers the
opportunity to collaboratively reuse the outputs of overlapping dataflows,
thereby improving the resource efficiency. In this paper, we propose
\emph{dataflow reuse algorithms} that given a submitted dataflow, identifies
the intersection of reusable tasks and streams from a collection of running
dataflows to form a \emph{merged dataflow}. Similar algorithms to unmerge
dataflows when they are removed are also proposed. We implement these
algorithms for the popular Apache Storm DSPS, and validate their performance
and resource savings for 35 synthetic dataflows based on public OPMW workflows
with diverse arrival and departure distributions, and on 21 real IoT dataflows
from RIoTBench.Comment: To appear in IEEE eScience Conference 201
Computational Sociolinguistics: A Survey
Language is a social phenomenon and variation is inherent to its social
nature. Recently, there has been a surge of interest within the computational
linguistics (CL) community in the social dimension of language. In this article
we present a survey of the emerging field of "Computational Sociolinguistics"
that reflects this increased interest. We aim to provide a comprehensive
overview of CL research on sociolinguistic themes, featuring topics such as the
relation between language and social identity, language use in social
interaction and multilingual communication. Moreover, we demonstrate the
potential for synergy between the research communities involved, by showing how
the large-scale data-driven methods that are widely used in CL can complement
existing sociolinguistic studies, and how sociolinguistics can inform and
challenge the methods and assumptions employed in CL studies. We hope to convey
the possible benefits of a closer collaboration between the two communities and
conclude with a discussion of open challenges.Comment: To appear in Computational Linguistics. Accepted for publication:
18th February, 201
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