11,161 research outputs found
Science and Subpoenas: When do the Courts Become Instruments of Manipulation?
Fischer says he believes that the uneasy relationship between law and science is likely to continue regarding disclosure of scientific research materials
Simplicity-Expressiveness Tradeoffs in Mechanism Design
A fundamental result in mechanism design theory, the so-called revelation
principle, asserts that for many questions concerning the existence of
mechanisms with a given outcome one can restrict attention to truthful direct
revelation-mechanisms. In practice, however, many mechanism use a restricted
message space. This motivates the study of the tradeoffs involved in choosing
simplified mechanisms, which can sometimes bring benefits in precluding bad or
promoting good equilibria, and other times impose costs on welfare and revenue.
We study the simplicity-expressiveness tradeoff in two representative settings,
sponsored search auctions and combinatorial auctions, each being a canonical
example for complete information and incomplete information analysis,
respectively. We observe that the amount of information available to the agents
plays an important role for the tradeoff between simplicity and expressiveness
Controlling Network Latency in Mixed Hadoop Clusters: Do We Need Active Queue Management?
With the advent of big data, data center applications are processing vast amounts of unstructured and semi-structured data, in parallel on large clusters, across hundreds to thousands of nodes. The highest performance for these batch big data workloads is achieved using expensive network equipment with large buffers, which accommodate bursts in network traffic and allocate bandwidth fairly even when the network is congested. Throughput-sensitive big data applications are, however, often executed in the same data center as latency-sensitive workloads. For both workloads to be supported well, the network must provide both maximum throughput and low latency. Progress has been made in this direction, as modern network switches support Active Queue Management (AQM) and Explicit Congestion Notifications (ECN), both mechanisms to control the level of queue occupancy, reducing the total network latency. This paper is the first study of the effect of Active Queue Management on both throughput and latency, in the context of Hadoop and the MapReduce programming model. We give a quantitative comparison of four different approaches for controlling buffer occupancy and latency: RED and CoDel, both standalone and also combined with ECN and DCTCP network protocol, and identify the AQM configurations that maintain Hadoop execution time gains from larger buffers within 5%, while reducing network packet latency caused by bufferbloat by up to 85%. Finally, we provide recommendations to administrators of Hadoop clusters as to how to improve latency without degrading the throughput of batch big data workloads.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Unions Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under grant agreement number 610456 (Euroserver).
The research was also supported by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of Spain under the contracts TIN2012-34557 and TIN2015-65316-P, Generalitat de Catalunya (contracts 2014-SGR-1051 and 2014-SGR-1272), HiPEAC-3 Network of Excellence (ICT- 287759), and the Severo Ochoa Program (SEV-2011-00067) of the Spanish Government.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Interconnect Energy Savings and Lower Latency Networks in Hadoop Clusters: The Missing Link
An important challenge of modern data centres running Hadoop workloads is to minimise energy consumption, a significant proportion of which is due to the network. Significant network savings are already possible using Energy Efficient Ethernet, supported by a large number of NICs and switches, but recent work has demonstrated that the packet coalescing settings must be carefully configured to avoid a substantial loss in performance. Meanwhile, Hadoop is evolving from its original batch concept to become a more iterative type of framework. Other recent work attempts to reduce Hadoop's network latency using Explicit Congestion Notifications. Linking these studies reveals that, surprisingly, even when packet coalescing does not hurt performance, it can degrade network latency much more than previously thought. This paper is the first to analyze the impact of packet coalescing in the context of network latency. We investigate how to design and configure interconnects to provide the maximum energy savings without degrading cluster throughput performance or network latency.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Unions Seventh Framework Programme
(FP7/2007–2013) under grant agreement number 610456 (Euroserver).
The research was also supported by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of Spain under the contracts TIN2012-34557 and TIN2015-65316-P, Generalitat de Catalunya (contracts 2014-SGR-1051 and 2014-SGR-1272), HiPEAC-3 Network of Excellence (ICT- 287759), and the Severo Ochoa Program (SEV-2011-00067) of the Spanish
Government.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Local stability of Kolmogorov forward equations for finite state nonlinear Markov processes
The focus of this work is on local stability of a class of nonlinear ordinary
differential equations (ODE) that describe limits of empirical measures
associated with finite-state weakly interacting N-particle systems. Local
Lyapunov functions are identified for several classes of such ODE, including
those associated with systems with slow adaptation and Gibbs systems. Using
results from [5] and large deviations heuristics, a partial differential
equation (PDE) associated with the nonlinear ODE is introduced and it is shown
that positive definite subsolutions of this PDE serve as local Lyapunov
functions for the ODE. This PDE characterization is used to construct explicit
Lyapunov functions for a broad class of models called locally Gibbs systems.
This class of models is significantly larger than the family of Gibbs systems
and several examples of such systems are presented, including models with
nearest neighbor jumps and models with simultaneous jumps that arise in
applications.Comment: Updated to include Acknowledgement
Limits of relative entropies associated with weakly interacting particle systems
The limits of scaled relative entropies between probability distributions
associated with N-particle weakly interacting Markov processes are considered.
The convergence of such scaled relative entropies is established in various
settings. The analysis is motivated by the role relative entropy plays as a
Lyapunov function for the (linear) Kolmogorov forward equation associated with
an ergodic Markov process, and Lyapunov function properties of these scaling
limits with respect to nonlinear finite-state Markov processes are studied in
the companion paper [6]
Rayleigh-Benard Convection with a Radial Ramp in Plate Separation
Pattern formation in Rayleigh-Benard convection in a large-aspect-ratio
cylinder with a radial ramp in the plate separation is studied analytically and
numerically by performing numerical simulations of the Boussinesq equations. A
horizontal mean flow and a vertical large scale counterflow are quantified and
used to understand the pattern wavenumber. Our results suggest that the mean
flow, generated by amplitude gradients, plays an important role in the roll
compression observed as the control parameter is increased. Near threshold the
mean flow has a quadrupole dependence with a single vortex in each quadrant
while away from threshold the mean flow exhibits an octupole dependence with a
counter-rotating pair of vortices in each quadrant. This is confirmed
analytically using the amplitude equation and Cross-Newell mean flow equation.
By performing numerical experiments the large scale counterflow is also found
to aid in the roll compression away from threshold but to a much lesser degree.
Our results yield an understanding of the pattern wavenumbers observed in
experiment away from threshold and suggest that near threshold the mean flow
and large scale counterflow are not responsible for the observed shift to
smaller than critical wavenumbers.Comment: 10 pages, 13 figure
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