2,457 research outputs found
Design and Implementation of a Distributed Middleware for Parallel Execution of Legacy Enterprise Applications
A typical enterprise uses a local area network of computers to perform its
business. During the off-working hours, the computational capacities of these
networked computers are underused or unused. In order to utilize this
computational capacity an application has to be recoded to exploit concurrency
inherent in a computation which is clearly not possible for legacy applications
without any source code. This thesis presents the design an implementation of a
distributed middleware which can automatically execute a legacy application on
multiple networked computers by parallelizing it. This middleware runs multiple
copies of the binary executable code in parallel on different hosts in the
network. It wraps up the binary executable code of the legacy application in
order to capture the kernel level data access system calls and perform them
distributively over multiple computers in a safe and conflict free manner. The
middleware also incorporates a dynamic scheduling technique to execute the
target application in minimum time by scavenging the available CPU cycles of
the hosts in the network. This dynamic scheduling also supports the CPU
availability of the hosts to change over time and properly reschedule the
replicas performing the computation to minimize the execution time. A prototype
implementation of this middleware has been developed as a proof of concept of
the design. This implementation has been evaluated with a few typical case
studies and the test results confirm that the middleware works as expected
The CIAO Multi-Dialect Compiler and System: An Experimentation Workbench for Future (C)LP Systems
CIAO is an advanced programming environment supporting Logic and Constraint programming. It offers a simple concurrent kernel on top of which declarative and non-declarative extensions are added via librarles. Librarles are available for supporting the ISOProlog standard, several constraint domains, functional and higher order programming, concurrent and distributed programming, internet programming, and others. The source language allows declaring properties of predicates via assertions, including types and modes. Such properties are checked at compile-time or at run-time. The compiler and system architecture are designed to natively support modular global analysis, with the two objectives of proving properties in assertions and performing program optimizations, including transparently exploiting parallelism in programs. The purpose of this paper is to report on recent progress made in the context of the CIAO system, with special emphasis on the capabilities of the compiler, the techniques used for supporting such capabilities, and the results in the ĂĄreas of program analysis and transformation already obtained with the system
Maintaining consistency in distributed systems
In systems designed as assemblies of independently developed components, concurrent access to data or data structures normally arises within individual programs, and is controlled using mutual exclusion constructs, such as semaphores and monitors. Where data is persistent and/or sets of operation are related to one another, transactions or linearizability may be more appropriate. Systems that incorporate cooperative styles of distributed execution often replicate or distribute data within groups of components. In these cases, group oriented consistency properties must be maintained, and tools based on the virtual synchrony execution model greatly simplify the task confronting an application developer. All three styles of distributed computing are likely to be seen in future systems - often, within the same application. This leads us to propose an integrated approach that permits applications that use virtual synchrony with concurrent objects that respect a linearizability constraint, and vice versa. Transactional subsystems are treated as a special case of linearizability
Life of occam-Pi
This paper considers some questions prompted by a brief review of the history of computing. Why is programming so hard? Why is concurrency considered an âadvancedâ subject? Whatâs the matter with Objects? Where did all the Maths go? In searching for answers, the paper looks at some concerns over fundamental ideas within object orientation (as represented by modern programming languages), before focussing on the concurrency model of communicating processes and its particular expression in the occam family of languages. In that focus, it looks at the history of occam, its underlying philosophy (Ockhamâs Razor), its semantic foundation on Hoareâs CSP, its principles of process oriented design and its development over almost three decades into occam-? (which blends in the concurrency dynamics of Milnerâs ?-calculus). Also presented will be an urgent need for rationalisation â occam-? is an experiment that has demonstrated significant results, but now needs time to be spent on careful review and implementing the conclusions of that review. Finally, the future is considered. In particular, is there a future
Analysis domain model for shared virtual environments
The field of shared virtual environments, which also
encompasses online games and social 3D environments, has a
system landscape consisting of multiple solutions that share great functional overlap. However, there is little system interoperability between the different solutions. A shared virtual environment has an associated problem domain that is highly complex raising difficult challenges to the development process, starting with the architectural design of the underlying system. This paper has two main contributions. The first contribution is a broad domain analysis of shared virtual environments, which enables developers to have a better understanding of the whole rather than the part(s). The second contribution is a reference domain model for discussing and describing solutions - the Analysis Domain Model
Fast and Precise Symbolic Analysis of Concurrency Bugs in Device Drivers
© 2015 IEEE.Concurrency errors, such as data races, make device drivers notoriously hard to develop and debug without automated tool support. We present Whoop, a new automated approach that statically analyzes drivers for data races. Whoop is empowered by symbolic pairwise lockset analysis, a novel analysis that can soundly detect all potential races in a driver. Our analysis avoids reasoning about thread interleavings and thus scales well. Exploiting the race-freedom guarantees provided by Whoop, we achieve a sound partial-order reduction that significantly accelerates Corral, an industrial-strength bug-finder for concurrent programs. Using the combination of Whoop and Corral, we analyzed 16 drivers from the Linux 4.0 kernel, achieving 1.5 - 20à speedups over standalone Corral
Efficient HTTP based I/O on very large datasets for high performance computing with the libdavix library
Remote data access for data analysis in high performance computing is
commonly done with specialized data access protocols and storage systems. These
protocols are highly optimized for high throughput on very large datasets,
multi-streams, high availability, low latency and efficient parallel I/O. The
purpose of this paper is to describe how we have adapted a generic protocol,
the Hyper Text Transport Protocol (HTTP) to make it a competitive alternative
for high performance I/O and data analysis applications in a global computing
grid: the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid. In this work, we first analyze the
design differences between the HTTP protocol and the most common high
performance I/O protocols, pointing out the main performance weaknesses of
HTTP. Then, we describe in detail how we solved these issues. Our solutions
have been implemented in a toolkit called davix, available through several
recent Linux distributions. Finally, we describe the results of our benchmarks
where we compare the performance of davix against a HPC specific protocol for a
data analysis use case.Comment: Presented at: Very large Data Bases (VLDB) 2014, Hangzho
Enhancing Workflow with a Semantic Description of Scientific Intent
Peer reviewedPreprin
Three Highly Parallel Computer Architectures and Their Suitability for Three Representative Artificial Intelligence Problems
Virtually all current Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications are designed to run on sequential (von Neumann) computer architectures. As a result, current systems do not scale up. As knowledge is added to these systems, a point is reached where their performance quickly degrades. The performance of a von Neumann machine is limited by the bandwidth between memory and processor (the von Neumann bottleneck). The bottleneck is avoided by distributing the processing power across the memory of the computer. In this scheme the memory becomes the processor (a smart memory ).
This paper highlights the relationship between three representative AI application domains, namely knowledge representation, rule-based expert systems, and vision, and their parallel hardware realizations. Three machines, covering a wide range of fundamental properties of parallel processors, namely module granularity, concurrency control, and communication geometry, are reviewed: the Connection Machine (a fine-grained SIMD hypercube), DADO (a medium-grained MIMD/SIMD/MSIMD tree-machine), and the Butterfly (a coarse-grained MIMD Butterflyswitch machine)
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