A generic I/O architecture for data-intensiveapplications based on in-memorydistributed cache

Proceedings of the First PhD Symposium on Sustainable Ultrascale Computing Systems (NESUS PhD 2016) Timisoara, Romania. February 8-11, 2016.The evolution in scientific computing towards data-intensive applications and the increase of heterogeneity in the computing resources, are exposing new challenges in the I/O layer requirements. We propose a generic I/O architecture for data-intensive applications based on in-memory distributed caching. This solution leverages the evolution of network capacities and the price drop in memory to improve I/O performance for I/O-bounded applications adaptable to existing high-performance scenarios. We have showed the potential improvementsEuropean Cooperation in Science and Technology. COSTThis work is partially supported by EU under the COST Program Action IC1305: Network for Sustainable Ultrascale Computing (NESUS). This work is partially supported by the grant TIN2013-41350-P, Scalable Data Management Techniques for High-End Computing Systems from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness

Subsidence damage assessment of a Gothic church using differential interferometry and field data

The Santas Justa and Rufina Gothic church (fourteenth century) has suffered several physical, mechanical, chemical, and biochemical types of pathologies along its history: rock alveolization, efflorescence, biological activity, and capillary ascent of groundwater. However, during the last two decades, a new phenomenon has seriously affected the church: ground subsidence caused by aquifer overexploitation. Subsidence is a process that affects the whole Vega Baja of the Segura River basin and consists of gradual sinking in the ground surface caused by soil consolidation due to a pore pressure decrease. This phenomenon has been studied by differential synthetic aperture radar interferometry techniques, which illustrate settlements up to 100 mm for the 1993–2009 period for the whole Orihuela city. Although no differential synthetic aperture radar interferometry information is available for the church due to the loss of interferometric coherence, the spatial analysis of nearby deformation combined with fieldwork has advanced the current understanding on the mechanisms that affect the Santas Justa and Rufina church. These results show the potential interest and the limitations of using this remote sensing technique as a complementary tool for the forensic analysis of building structures.Roberto Tomás is supported by a Generalitat Valenciana fellowship BEST-2011/225. The European Space Agency (ESA) Terrafirma project has funded all the SAR data processing with the SPN technique. Additionally, this study has been partially financed by the projects: TEC-2008-06764, TEC2011-28201-C02-02 ACOMP/2010/082, VIGROB-157, and 15224/PI/10

Mapping vulnerable urban areas affected by slow-moving landslides using Sentinel-1InSAR data

Landslides are widespread natural hazards that generate considerable damage and economic losses worldwide. Detecting terrain movements caused by these phenomena and characterizing affected urban areas is critical to reduce their impact. Here we present a fast and simple methodology to create maps of vulnerable buildings affected by slow-moving landslides, based on two parameters: (1) the deformation rate associated to each building, measured from Sentinel-1 SAR data, and (2) the building damage generated by the landslide movement and recorded during a field campaign. We apply this method to Arcos de la Frontera, a monumental town in South Spain affected by a slow-moving landslide that has caused severe damage to buildings, forcing the evacuation of some of them. Our results show that maximum deformation rates of 4 cm/year in the line-of-sight (LOS) of the satellite, affects La Verbena, a newly-developed area, and displacements are mostly horizontal, as expected for a planar-landslide. Our building damage assessment reveals that most of the building blocks in La Verbena present moderate to severe damages. According to our vulnerability scale, 93% of the building blocks analysed present high vulnerability and, thus, should be the focus of more in-depth local studies to evaluate the serviceability of buildings, prior to adopting the necessary mitigation measures to reduce or cope with the negative consequences of this landslide. This methodology can be applied to slow-moving landslides worldwide thanks to the global availability of Sentinel-1 SAR data.Postprint (published version

Deep Learning-Based Method for Accurate Real-Time Seed Detection in Glass Bottle Manufacturing

Glass bottle-manufacturing companies produce bottles of different colors, shapes and sizes. One identified problem is that seeds appear in the bottle mainly due to the temperature and parameters of the oven. This paper presents a new system capable of detecting seeds of 0.1 mm2 in size in glass bottles as they are being manufactured, 24 h per day and 7 days per week. The bottles move along the conveyor belt at 50 m/min, at a production rate of 250 bottles/min. This new proposed method includes deep learning-based artificial intelligence techniques and classical image processing on images acquired with a high-speed line camera. The algorithm comprises three stages. First, the bottle is identified in the input image. Next, an algorithm based in thresholding and morphological operations is applied on this bottle region to locate potential candidates for seeds. Finally, a deep learning-based model can classify whether the proposed candidates are real seeds or not. This method manages to filter out most of false positives due to stains in the glass surface, while no real seeds are lost. The F1 achieved is 0.97. This method reveals the advantages of deep learning techniques for problems where classical image processing algorithms are not sufficient.This work was partially supported by OPENZDM project. This is a project from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No. 101058673 in the call HORIZON-CL4-2021-TWIN-TRANSITION-0

Visiting supermarket through virtual reality: an opportunity for rehabilitation of people with disability

[Abstract] The process of rehabilitation of physical or cognitive skills in people with disabilities can be long, monotonous and unmotivating. Exercises can often involve mechanical and repetitive movements, which can have a negative impact on adherence to the rehabilitation process. The aim of this work is the use of virtual reality (VR) environments for the improvement of physical and cognitive skills. The researcher’s proposal is a work based on activities of daily living, which can facilitate the transfer of the improvements obtained to the person’s daily life. The proposed environment represents a very realistic supermarket, which provides a high degree of immersion. Four activities are proposed to take place in different locations in the supermarket. These activities will involve the movement of different parts of the body to improve physical skills. Cognitive skills related to memory, coordination or mental agility will also be worked on. The application will track the person’s movements and record various parameters related to the achievement of the activity. This data can be consulted by the health professional, which could contribute to a better evaluation of the user’s progress.PID2019-104323RB-C33; Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (España

CoSMiC: A hierarchical cloudlet-based storage architecture for mobile clouds

Storage capacity is a constraint for current mobile devices. Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) is developed to augment device capabilities, facilitating to mobile users store/access of a large dataset on the cloud through wireless networks. However, given the limitations of network bandwidth, latencies, and devices battery life, new solutions are needed to extend the usage of mobile devices. This paper presents a novel design and implementation of a hierarchical cloud storage system for mobile devices based on multiple I/O caching layers. The solution relies on Memcached as a cache system, preserving its powerful capacities such as performance, scalability, and quick and portable deployment. The solution targets to reduce the I/O latency of current mobile cloud solutions. The proposed solution consists of a user-level library and extended Memcached back-ends. The solution aims to be hierarchical by deploying Memcached-based I/O cache servers across all the I/O infrastructure datapath. Our experimental results demonstrate that CoSMiC can significantly reduce the round-trip latency in presence of low cache hit ratios compared with a 3G connection even when using a multi-level cache hierarchy

Evaluating data caching techniques in DMCF workflows using Hercules

The Data Mining Cloud Framework (DMCF) is an environment for designing and executing data analysis workflows in cloud platforms. Currently, DMCF relies on the default storage of the public cloud provider for any I/O related operation. This implies that the I/O performance of DMCF is limited by the performance of the default storage. In this work we propose the usage of the Hercules system within DMCF as an ad-hoc storage system for temporary data produced inside workflow-based applications. Hercules is a distributed in-memory storage system highly scalable and easy to deploy. The proposed solution takes advantage of the scalability capabilities of Hercules to avoid the bandwidth limits of the default storage. Early experimental results are presented in this paper, they show promising performance, particularly for write operations, compared to the performance obtained using the default storage services.This work is partially supported by EU under the COST Program Action IC1305: Network for Sustainable Ultrascale Computing (NESUS). This work is partially supported by the grant TIN2013-41350-P, Scalable Data Management Techniques for High-End Computing Systems from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness

Characteristics of the Videos in Spanish Posted on Youtube about Human Papillomavirus Vaccines

Fundamentos: Internet constituye un recurso de búsqueda de información relacionada con la salud. El objetivo de este trabajo fue conocer las características de los vídeos en idioma español de YouTube relacionados con la vacuna contra el virus del papiloma humano (VPH). Métodos: Se realizó un estudio observacional a partir de una búsqueda en YouTube el 26 de julio de 2013, con las palabras claves: “vacuna virus papiloma humano”, “vacuna VPH”, “vacuna Gardasil”, “vacuna Cervarix”. Se establecieron categorías por tipo, fuente de publicación y predisposición favorable o no hacia la vacuna. Se registró el número de visitas, tiempo de duración de los videos y origen de los 20 vídeos más visitados. Resultados. Se encontraron 1.080 videos registrados, 170 fueron seleccionados y clasificados como: noticias locales (n=39; 37 favorables, 2 desfavorables; 2:06:29; 42972 visitas), noticias nacionales (n=32; 30/2; 1:49:27; 50138 visitas), creados por subscritores de YouTube (n=21; 13/8; 2:50:35; 144655 visitas), entrevistas (n=21; 20/1; 1:44:39; 10991 visitas), anuncios (n=21; 19/2; 0:27:05; 28435 visitas), conferencias (n=17; 15/2; 3:25:39; 27206 visitas), documentales (n=16; 12/4; 2:11:31; 30629 visitas), y noticias internacionales (n=3; 3/0; 0:11:33; 1667 visitas). De los 20 videos más reproducidos predominan los favorables a la vacunación (n=12; 0:43:43; 161.789 visitas) frente a los desfavorables (n=8; 2:44:14; 86.583 visitas). Conclusiones. Predominan los videos que tiene una opinión favorable hacia la vacuna contra el VPH, aunque los videos de contenido negativo son los más extensos y reproducidos.Background. Internet is a resource to search for health-related information. The aim of this work was to know the content of the videos in Spanish language of YouTube related to the vaccine against the human papilloma virus (HPV). Metthods. An observational study was conducted from a search on YouTube on 26th July 2013 by using keywords such as: “human papilloma virus vaccine”, “HPV vaccine”, “Gardasil vaccine”, “Cervarix vaccine”. Different categories were established according to: the type of vaccine, the published source and the favorable or unfavorable predisposition towards the human papillomavirus vaccination. The number of visits and the duration of the videos were gathered, with analysis of variables in the 20 most visited videos. Results. A total of 170 videos were classified like: local news (n=39; 37 favorable, 2 unfavorable; 2:06:29; 42972 visits), national news (n=32; 30/2; 1:49:27; 50138 visits), created by YouTube subscribers (n=21; 21/1; 1:44:39; 10991 visits), advertisements (n=21; 19/2; 0:27:05; 28435 visits), conferences (n=17; 15/2; 3:25:39; 27206 visits), documentaries (n=16; 12/4; 2:11:31; 30629 visits). From all of the 20 most viewed YouTube videos predominated those which were favorable to the vaccination (n=12; 0:43:43; 161789 visits) against the unfavorable (n=8; 2:44:14; 86583 visits). Conclusions. Most of the videos have a favorable opinion towards HPV vaccine, although videos with a negative content were the longest and most viewed

Exploiting data locality in Swift/T workflows using Hercules

The ever-increasing power of supercomputer systems is both driving and enabling the emergence of new problem-solving methods that require the efficient execution of many concurrent and interacting tasks. Swift/T, as a description language and runtime, offers the dynamic creation and execution of workflows, varying in granularity, on high-component-count platforms. Swift/T takes advantage of the Asynchronous Dynamic Load Balancing (ADLB) library to dynamically distribute the tasks among the nodes. These tasks may share data using a parallel file system, an approach that could degrade performance as a result of interference with other applications and poor exploitation of data locality. The objective of this work is to expose and exploit data locality in Swift/T through Hercules, a distributed in-memory store based on Memcached, and to explore tradeoffs between data locality and load balance in distributed workflow executions. In this paper we present our approach to enable locality-based optimizations in Swift/T by guiding ADLB to schedule computation jobs in the nodes containing the required data. We also analyze the interaction between locality and load balance: our initial measurements based on various raw file access patterns show promising results. Moreover, we present future work based on the promising results achieved so far.This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, under contract DE-AC02-06CH11357. Computing resources were provided by the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility. The work presented in this paper was supported by the COST Action IC1305, “Network for Sustainable Ultrascale Computing (NESUS).” The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement number 328582

Different aspects of workflow scheduling in large-scale distributed systems

As large-scale distributed systems gain momentum, the scheduling of workflow applications with multiple requirements in such computing platforms has become a crucial area of research. In this paper, we investigate the workflow scheduling problem in large-scale distributed systems, from the Quality of Service (QoS) and data locality perspectives. We present a scheduling approach, considering two models of synchronization for the tasks in a workflow application: (a) communication through the network and (b) communication through temporary files. Specifically, we investigate via simulation the performance of a heterogeneous distributed system, where multiple soft real-time workflow applications arrive dynamically. The applications are scheduled under various tardiness bounds, taking into account the communication cost in the first case study and the I/O cost and data locality in the second.The work presented in this paper has been partially supported by EU, under the COST program Action IC1305, “Network for Sustainable Ultrascale Computing (NESUS)”, and by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Spain, under the project TIN2013-41350-P, “Scalable Data Management Techniques for High-End Computing Systems”