981 research outputs found
Designing and implementing a distributed earthquake early warning system for resilient communities: a PhD thesis
The present work aims to comprehensively contribute to the process, design, and technologies of Earthquake Early Warning (EEW). EEW systems aim to detect the earthquake immediately at the epicenter and relay the information in real-time to nearby areas, anticipating the arrival of the shake. These systems exploit the difference between the earthquake wave speed and the time needed to detect and send alerts. This Ph.D. thesis aims to improve the adoption, robustness, security, and scalability of Earthquake Early Warning systems using a decentralized approach to data processing and information exchange. The proposed architecture aims to have a more resilient detection, remove Single point of failure, higher efficiency, mitigate security vulnerabilities, and improve privacy regarding centralized EEW architectures. A prototype of the proposed architecture has been implemented using low-cost sensors and processing devices to quickly assess the ability to provide the expected
information and guarantees. The capabilities of the proposed architecture are evaluated not only on the main EEW problem but also on the quick estimation of the epicentral area of an earthquake, and the results demonstrated that our proposal is capable of matching the performance of current centralized counterparts
All the ties that bind. A socio-semantic network analysis of Twitter political discussions
Social media play a crucial role in what contemporary sociological reflections define as a ‘hybrid
media system’. Online spaces created by social media platforms resemble global public
squares hosting large-scale social networks populated by citizens, political leaders, parties
and organizations, journalists, activists and institutions that establish direct interactions and
exchange contents in a disintermediated fashion. In the last decade, an increasing number
of studies from researchers coming from different disciplines has approached the study of the
manifold facets of citizen participation in online political spaces. In most cases, these studies
have focused on the investigation of direct relationships amongst political actors. Conversely,
relatively less attention has been paid to the study of contents that circulate during online
discussions and how their diffusion contributes to building political identities. Even more
rarely, the study of social media contents has been investigated in connection with those concerning
social interactions amongst online users. To fill in this gap, my thesis work proposes
a methodological procedure consisting in a network-based, data-driven approach to both
infer communities of users with a similar communication behavior and to extract the most
prominent contents discussed within those communities. More specifically, my work focuses
on Twitter, a social media platform that is widely used during political debates. Groups
of users with a similar retweeting behavior - hereby referred to as discursive communities -
are identified starting with the bipartite network of Twitter verified users retweeted by nonverified
users. Once the discursive communities are obtained, the corresponding semantic
networks are identified by considering the co-occurrences of the hashtags that are present in
the tweets sent by their members.
The identification of discursive communities and the study of the related semantic networks
represent the starting point for exploring more in detail two specific conversations that took
place in the Italian Twittersphere: the former occured during the electoral campaign before
the 2018 Italian general elections and in the two weeks after Election day; the latter
centered on the issue of migration during the period May-November 2019. Regarding the
social analysis, the main result of my work is the identification of a behavior-driven picture
of discursive communities induced by the retweeting activity of Twitter users, rather than
determined by prior information on their political affiliation. Although these communities
do not necessarily match the political orientation of their users, they are closely related to
the evolution of the Italian political arena. As for the semantic analysis, this work sheds light
on the symbolic dimension of partisan dynamics. Different discursive communities are, in
fact, characterized by a peculiar conversational dynamics at both the daily and the monthly
time-scale. From a purely methodological aspect, semantic networks have been analyzed by
employing three (increasingly restrictive) benchmarks. The k-shell decomposition of both
filtered and non-filtered semantic networks reveals the presence of a core-periphery structure
providing information on the most debated topics within each discursive community and
characterizing the communication strategy of the corresponding political coalition
Planetary Scale Data Storage
The success of virtualization and container-based application deployment has fundamentally changed computing infrastructure from dedicated hardware provisioning to on-demand, shared clouds of computational resources. One of the most interesting effects of this shift is the opportunity to localize applications in multiple geographies and support mobile users around the globe. With relatively few steps, an application and its data systems can be deployed and scaled across continents and oceans, leveraging the existing data centers of much larger cloud providers.
The novelty and ease of a global computing context means that we are closer to the advent of an Oceanstore, an Internet-like revolution in personalized, persistent data that securely travels with its users. At a global scale, however, data systems suffer from physical limitations that significantly impact its consistency and performance. Even with modern telecommunications technology, the latency in communication from Brazil to Japan results in noticeable synchronization delays that violate user expectations. Moreover, the required scale of such systems means that failure is routine.
To address these issues, we explore consistency in the implementation of distributed logs, key/value databases and file systems that are replicated across wide areas. At the core of our system is hierarchical consensus, a geographically-distributed consensus algorithm that provides strong consistency, fault tolerance, durability, and adaptability to varying user access patterns. Using hierarchical consensus as a backbone, we further extend our system from data centers to edge regions using federated consistency, an adaptive consistency model that gives satellite replicas high availability at a stronger global consistency than existing weak consistency models.
In a deployment of 105 replicas in 15 geographic regions across 5 continents, we show that our implementation provides high throughput, strong consistency, and resiliency in the face of failure. From our experimental validation, we conclude that planetary-scale data storage systems can be implemented algorithmically without sacrificing consistency or performance
Scheduling and reconfiguration of interconnection network switches
Interconnection networks are important parts of modern computing systems, facilitating communication between a system\u27s components. Switches connecting various nodes of an interconnection network serve to move data in the network. The switch\u27s delay and throughput impact the overall performance of the network and thus the system. Scheduling efficient movement of data through a switch and configuring the switch to realize a schedule are the main themes of this research. We consider various interconnection network switches including (i) crossbar-based switches, (ii) circuit-switched tree switches, and (iii) fat-tree switches. For crossbar-based input-queued switches, a recent result established that logarithmic packet delay is possible. However, this result assumes that packet transmission time through the switch is no less than schedule-generation time. We prove that without this assumption (as is the case in practice) packet delay becomes linear. We also report results of simulations that bear out our result for practical switch sizes and indicate that a fast scheduling algorithm reduces not only packet delay but also buffer size. We also propose a fast mesh-of-trees based distributed switch scheduling (maximal-matching based) algorithm that has polylog complexity. A circuit-switched tree (CST) can serve as an interconnect structure for various computing architectures and models such as the self-reconfigurable gate array and the reconfigurable mesh. A CST is a tree structure with source and destination processing elements as leaves and switches as internal nodes. We design several scheduling and configuration algorithms that distributedly partition a given set of communications into non-conflicting subsets and then establish switch settings and paths on the CST corresponding to the communications. A fat-tree is another widely used interconnection structure in many of today\u27s high-performance clusters. We embed a reconfigurable mesh inside a fat-tree switch to generate efficient connections. We present an R-Mesh-based algorithm for a fat-tree switch that creates buses connecting input and output ports corresponding to various communications using that switch
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