In-memory, distributed content-based recommender system

Burdened by their popularity, recommender systems increasingly take on larger datasets while they are expected to deliver high quality results within reasonable time. To meet these ever growing requirements, industrial recommender systems often turn to parallel hardware and distributed computing. While the MapReduce paradigm is generally accepted for massive parallel data processing, it often entails complex algorithm reorganization and suboptimal efficiency because mid-computation values are typically read from and written to hard disk. This work implements an in-memory, content-based recommendation algorithm and shows how it can be parallelized and efficiently distributed across many homogeneous machines in a distributed-memory environment. By focusing on data parallelism and carefully constructing the definition of work in the context of recommender systems, we are able to partition the complete calculation process into any number of independent and equally sized jobs. An empirically validated performance model is developed to predict parallel speedup and promises high efficiencies for realistic hardware configurations. For the MovieLens 10 M dataset we note efficiency values up to 71 % for a configuration of 200 computing nodes (eight cores per node)

A Parallel Adaptive P3M code with Hierarchical Particle Reordering

We discuss the design and implementation of HYDRA_OMP a parallel implementation of the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics-Adaptive P3M (SPH-AP3M) code HYDRA. The code is designed primarily for conducting cosmological hydrodynamic simulations and is written in Fortran77+OpenMP. A number of optimizations for RISC processors and SMP-NUMA architectures have been implemented, the most important optimization being hierarchical reordering of particles within chaining cells, which greatly improves data locality thereby removing the cache misses typically associated with linked lists. Parallel scaling is good, with a minimum parallel scaling of 73% achieved on 32 nodes for a variety of modern SMP architectures. We give performance data in terms of the number of particle updates per second, which is a more useful performance metric than raw MFlops. A basic version of the code will be made available to the community in the near future.Comment: 34 pages, 12 figures, accepted for publication in Computer Physics Communication

Principles for problem aggregation and assignment in medium scale multiprocessors

One of the most important issues in parallel processing is the mapping of workload to processors. This paper considers a large class of problems having a high degree of potential fine grained parallelism, and execution requirements that are either not predictable, or are too costly to predict. The main issues in mapping such a problem onto medium scale multiprocessors are those of aggregation and assignment. We study a method of parameterized aggregation that makes few assumptions about the workload. The mapping of aggregate units of work onto processors is uniform, and exploits locality of workload intensity to balance the unknown workload. In general, a finer aggregate granularity leads to a better balance at the price of increased communication/synchronization costs; the aggregation parameters can be adjusted to find a reasonable granularity. The effectiveness of this scheme is demonstrated on three model problems: an adaptive one-dimensional fluid dynamics problem with message passing, a sparse triangular linear system solver on both a shared memory and a message-passing machine, and a two-dimensional time-driven battlefield simulation employing message passing. Using the model problems, the tradeoffs are studied between balanced workload and the communication/synchronization costs. Finally, an analytical model is used to explain why the method balances workload and minimizes the variance in system behavior

MINIMIZATION OF RESOURCE CONSUMPTION THROUGH WORKLOAD CONSOLIDATION IN LARGE-SCALE DISTRIBUTED DATA PLATFORMS

The rapid increase in the data volumes encountered in many application domains has led to widespread adoption of parallel and distributed data management systems like parallel databases and MapReduce-based frameworks (e.g., Hadoop) in recent years. Use of such parallel and distributed frameworks is expected to accelerate in the coming years, putting further strain on already-scarce resources like compute power, network bandwidth, and energy. To reduce total execution times, there is a trend towards increasing execution parallelism by spreading out data across a large number of machines. However, this often increases the total resource consumption, and especially energy consumption, significantly because of process startup costs and other overheads (e.g., communication overheads). In this dissertation, we develop several data management techniques to minimize resource consumption through workload consolidation. In this dissertation, we introduce a key metric called query span, i.e., number of machines involved in the execution of a query or a job. In order to minimize the per query resource consumption we propose to minimize query span. To that end, we develop several workload-driven data partitioning and replica selection algorithms that attempt to minimize the average query span by exploiting the fact that most distributed environments need to use replication for fault tolerance. Extensive experiments on various datasets show that judicious data placement and replication can dramatically reduce the average query spans resulting in significant reductions in resource consumption. We show our results primarily on two applications, distributed data warehouse system and distributed information retrieval. In the first case, we show that minimizing average query spans can minimize overall resource consumption for a given workload and can also improve the performance of complex analytical queries. In the second case, our approach minimizes the overall search cost as well as effectively trades off search cost with load imbalance. The best case of resource efficiency for any underlying data processing system is achieved when the job or the query can be run efficiently on a single machine (i.e., query span=1). In the final part of dissertation, we discuss an in-memory MapReduce system optimized for performing complex analytics tasks on input data sizes that fit in a single machine's memory. We argue that systems like Hadoop that are designed to operate across a large number of machines are not optimal in performance for small and medium sized complex analytics tasks because of high startup costs, heavy disk activity, and wasteful checkpointing. We have developed a prototype runtime called HONE that is API compatible with standard (distributed) Hadoop. In other words, we can take existing Hadoop code and run it, without modification, on a multi-core shared memory machine. This allows us to take existing Hadoop algorithms and find the most suitable runtime environment for execution on datasets of varying sizes. Overall, in this dissertation, our key contributions in this work include identification of key metric query span and its relationship with overall resource consumption in scale-out architectures. We introduce several workload-aware techniques to optimize this key metric. We go on to demonstrate the effectiveness of query span minimization on different application scenarios. In order to take advantage of scale-up architectures effectively we develop novel in-memory MapReduce system HONE for single machine. Our thorough experiments on real and synthetic datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed approaches

Energy Efficient Policies, Scheduling, and Design for Sustainable Manufacturing Systems

Climate mitigation, more stringent regulations, rising energy costs, and sustainable manufacturing are pushing researchers to focus on energy efficiency, energy flexibility, and implementation of renewable energy sources in manufacturing systems. This thesis aims to analyze the main works proposed regarding these hot topics, and to fill the gaps in the literature. First, a detailed literature review is proposed. Works regarding energy efficiency in different manufacturing levels, in the assembly line, energy saving policies, and the implementation of renewable energy sources are analyzed. Then, trying to fill the gaps in the literature, different topics are analyzed more in depth. In the single machine context, a mathematical model aiming to align the manufacturing power required to a renewable energy supply in order to obtain the maximum profit is developed. The model is applied to a single work center powered by the electric grid and by a photovoltaic system; afterwards, energy storage is also added to the power system. Analyzing the job shop context, switch off policies implementing workload approach and scheduling considering variable speed of the machines and power constraints are proposed. The direct and indirect workloads of the machines are considered to support the switch on/off decisions. A simulation model is developed to test the proposed policies compared to others presented in the literature. Regarding the job shop scheduling, a fixed and variable power constraints are considered, assuming the minimization of the makespan as the objective function. Studying the factory level, a mathematical model to design a flow line considering the possibility of using switch-off policies is developed. The design model for production lines includes a targeted imbalance among the workstations to allow for defined idle time. Finally, the main findings, results, and the future directions and challenges are presented