JetStream: Enabling high throughput live event streaming on multi-site clouds

International audienceScientific and commercial applications operate nowadays on tens of cloud datacenters around the globe, following similar patterns: they aggregate monitoring or sensor data, assess the QoS or run global data mining queries based on inter-site event stream processing. Enabling fast data transfers across geographically distributed sites allows such applications to manage the continuous streams of events in real time and quickly react to changes. However, traditional event processing engines often consider data resources as second-class citizens and support access to data only as a side-effect of computation (i.e. they are not concerned by the transfer of events from their source to the processing site). This is an efficient approach as long as the processing is executed in a single cluster where nodes are interconnected by low latency networks. In a distributed environment, consisting of multiple datacenters, with orders of magnitude differences in capabilities and connected by a WAN, this will undoubtedly lead to significant latency and performance variations. This is namely the challenge we address in this paper, by proposing JetStream, a high performance batch-based streaming middleware for efficient transfers of events between cloud datacenters. JetStream is able to self-adapt to the streaming conditions by modeling and monitoring a set of context parameters. It further aggregates the available bandwidth by enabling multi-route streaming across cloud sites, while at the same time optimizing resource utilization and increasing cost efficiency. The prototype was validated on tens of nodes from US and Europe datacenters of the Windows Azure cloud with synthetic benchmarks and a real-life application monitoring the ALICE experiment at CERN. The results show a 3x increase of the transfer rate using the adaptive multi-route streaming, compared to state of the art solutions

Supporting NGS pipelines in the cloud

[EN] Cloud4Science is a research activity funded by Microsoft that develops a unique online platform providing cloud services, datasets, tools, documentations, tutorial and best practices to meet the needs of researchers across the globe in terms of storing and managing datasets. Cloud4Science initially focuses on dedicated services for the bioinformatics community. Its ultimate goal is to support a wide range of scientific communities as the natural first choice for scientific data curation, analysis andThe authors want to thank Microsoft and the cloud4Science project for funding this research activity.Blanquer Espert, I.; Brasche, G.; Cala, J.; Gagliardi, F.; Gannon, D.; Hiden, H.; Soncu, H.... (2013). Supporting NGS pipelines in the cloud. EMBnet Journal. 19(Supplement A):14-16. doi:10.14806/ej.19.A.625S141619Supplement

TomusBlobs: Towards Communication-Efficient Storage for MapReduce Applications in Azure

International audienceThe emergence of cloud computing brought the opportunity to use large-scale computational infrastructures for a broad spectrum of applications and users. As the cloud paradigm gets attractive for the "elasticity" in resource usage and associated costs (the users only pay for resources actualy used), cloud applications still suffer from the high latencies and low performance of cloud storage services. Enabling high- throughput massive data processing on cloud data becomes a critical issue, as it impacts the overall application performance. In this paper we address the above challenge at the level of the cloud storage. We introduce a concurrency-optimized data storage system which federates the virtual disks associated to VMs. We demonstrate the performance of our solution for efficient data-intensive processing on commercial clouds by build- ing an optimized prototype MapReduce framework for Azure that leverages the benefits of our storage solution. We perform extensive microbenchmarks as well as experiments with real- world applications: they demonstrate that our solution brings substantial benefits to data intensive applications compared to approaches relying on state-of-the-art cloud object storag

Affective theory of mind in human aging: is there any relation with executive functioning?

PubMed ID: 30994403Theory of Mind (ToM) refers to the ability to make inferences on other’s mental or emotional states. Although there is evidence suggesting that impaired executive functions due to aging could have a negative impact on cognitive ToM, there is still controversy about the effect of age and age-related executive dysfunctions on affective ToM. To investigate affective ToM in healthy aging and its relationship with executive functions, we examined Reading Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET) performance and executive functions among young and older adults. There was no significant difference between age groups regarding their RMET scores. While affective ToM was correlated to executive functioning within the younger group, short term memory was found to be associated with RMET performance among older participants. Furthermore, within the older group, women performed better than men. Our findings suggest a preserved ability of affective ToM in healthy aging, which appears to be independent of executive functioning.Publisher's Versio

An investigation of affective personality traits in Alzheimer’s disease: seeking as a possible predictor for early-stage Alzheimer’s dementia

Objective: The aim of the current study was to investigate affective personality traits in Alzheimer’s disease, a neurodegenerative condition mainly characterized by episodic memory impairment. Method: The sample included 69 participants from 3 diagnostic categories. Twenty-five participants were diagnosed with subjective cognitive impairment (SCI), 26 participants were diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment of the amnestic type (aMCI), and the remaining 18 participants were diagnosed with early-stage Alzheimer’s dementia (ADD). Diagnostic labels were given as a result of detailed neurological, neuropsychological, and neuroradiological assessment. Affective personality traits were assessed via Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales (ANPS). Results: The only significant intergroup difference was obtained for the SEEKING subscale of ANPS. Here, ADD group scored significantly lower compared to the SCI group. The results of logistic regression analysis also indicated that SEEKING score successfully predicted early-stage ADD diagnosis. Conclusion: The results suggest that a specific personality constellation characterized by reduced investment in the outside world might be associated with Alzheimer’s disease, either as a risk factor or a byproduct of the neurodegenerative process initiated by AD pathology.Publisher's VersionQ3WOS:001063325500001PMID: 3769569

An investigation of affective theory of mind ability and its relation to neuropsychological functions in Alzheimer's disease

PubMed ID: 32212244Although cognitive theory of mind (ToM) has been largely studied within neurodegenerative disorders including Alzheimer's disease (AD), studies focusing on affective ToM are relatively limited, yielding inconsistent findings. The current study aimed at investigating affective ToM abilities within different stages of AD (mild AD dementia [ADD], mild cognitive impairment [MCI], and subjective cognitive impairment [SCI]), together with its relationship with neuropsychological functioning. Eighty-one participants were tested with two different ToM tasks (Faux Pas Recognition Test [FPR] and Reading Mind in the Eyes Test [RMET]) and tests of attention, executive functions, episodic memory, and facial recognition. Our results showed two different affective ToM profiles in AD continuum: while ADD group performed poorly on both tasks of ToM, MCI group displayed deteriorated performance on RMET but not on FPR. In addition, ToM performance was significantly related to episodic memory and verbal fluency within the overall sample. These findings suggest that impairment in the decoding process of emotional cues could begin even in the prodromal stage of AD. In contrast, the reasoning process of emotional information, as measured with FPR, could be preserved until the dementia stage. Moreover, the relation of affective ToM with amnestic functions and verbal abilities could provide evidence of a domain-general ToM impairment in AD.This study was supported by BIDEB 2211 Program of The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK)Publisher's Versio

JetStream: Enabling High Performance Event Streaming across Cloud Data-Centers

International audienceThe easily-accessible computation power offered by cloud infrastructures coupled with the revolution of Big Data are expanding the scale and speed at which data analysis is per-formed. In their quest for finding the Value in the 3 Vs of Big Data, applications process larger data sets, within and across clouds. Enabling fast data transfers across geograph-ically distributed sites becomes particularly important for applications which manage continuous streams of events in real time. Scientific applications (e.g. the Ocean Observa-tory Initiative or the ATLAS experiment) as well as com-mercial ones (e.g. Microsoft's Bing and Office 365 large-scale services) operate on tens of data-centers around the globe and follow similar patterns: they aggregate monitoring data, assess the QoS or run global data mining queries based on in-ter site event stream processing. In this paper, we propose a set of strategies for efficient transfers of events between cloud data-centers and we introduce JetStream: a prototype implementing these strategies as a high performance batch-based streaming middleware. JetStream is able to self-adapt to the streaming conditions by modeling and monitoring a set of context parameters. It further aggregates the available bandwidth by enabling multi-route streaming across cloud sites. The prototype was validated on tens of nodes from US and Europe data-centers of the Windows Azure cloud using synthetic benchmarks and with application code from the context of the Alice experiment at CERN. The results show an increase in transfer rate of 250 times over individual event streaming. Besides, introducing an adaptive transfer strategy brings an additional 25% gain. Finally, the transfer rate can further be tripled thanks to the use of multi-route streaming

Alzheimer Hastalığında Olağan Durum Ve Dikkat Çekerlik Ağının Fonksiyonel Bağlantısallık Değişimleri

GİRİŞ VE AMAÇ:Alzheimer hastalığında (AH), en çok etkilendiği bilinen entrensek bağlantısallık ağları olağan durum ağı (DMN) ve dikkat çekerlik ağıdır (SN). Bu aǧların fonksiyonel bağlantısallık değişimlerinin, AH sürekliliği içinde kognitif bozulmanın en erken aşaması olan subjektif kognitif bozukluk (SCI) evresini objektif kriterlerle tanımlanan hafif kognitif bozukluk (MCI) evresinden ayırt etme kapasitesi henüz gösterilememiştir. Bu çalışmada, SCI, MCI ve erken evre AH demansı (AHD) grupları arasında DMN ve SN’de ortaya çıkan değişimler incelenmiştir. YÖNTEM:Çalışmada, yaş, cinsiyet ve eğitim ortalamaları anlamlı fark göstermeyen 3 gruptan 88 katılımcının (21 AHD, 34 MCI, 33 SCI) 3T MRI cihazı ile dinlenim durumu fonksiyonel manyetik rezonans görüntüleme verileri kaydedilmiştir. CONN yazılımı ile DMN ve SN’e karşılık gelen 11 adet ilgi bölgesinin (ROI) tüm beyin vokselleri ile olan fonksiyonel bağlantısallık analizleri gerçekleştirilmiştir. Öncelikle, 3 grup arasında F testiyle karşılaştırmalar yapılmış ve küme seviyesindeki anlamlılık eşiği p(FWE-corr) < 0,0045 (ROI sayısına göre Bonferroni düzeltmesi yapılmış) olarak belirlenmiştir. Ardından, F testinde anlamlı fark gösteren ROI’ler için t-testi ile gruplar arasında ikili karşılaştırmalar yapılmış ve anlamlı fark (anlamlılık eşiği p(FWE-corr) < 0,017, grup sayısına göre Bonferroni düzeltmesi yapılmış) gösteren sonuçlar bildirilmiştir. BULGULAR:AHD’de MCI ve SCI gruplarına kıyasla, DMN’in posterior singulat korteks düğümünün temporal ve oksipital korteks yapılarıyla, SN’in anterior singulat korteks (ACC) düğümünün sağ insula ve temporal korteks yapılarıyla ve SN’in sağ ve sol anterior insula düğümlerinin ACC ile olan fonksiyonel bağlantısallığının azaldığı gözlenmiştir. Ayrıca, AHD’de MCI grubuna kıyasla sol anterior insula düğümünün sağ insula ile ve SCI grubuna kıyasla saǧ ve sol anterior insula düğümlerinin suplementer motor alan ile olan bağlantısallıklarının azaldığı gözlenmiştir. TARTIŞMA VE SONUÇ:Bulgular, AH sürekliliğinde DMN ve SN’de gözlenen fonksiyonel bağlantısallık değişiminin hastalığın ileri evresinde ortaya çıktığını, SCI ve MCI evreleri arasında ise ayırt edici bir fonksiyonel bağlantısallık değişimi olmadıǧını ortaya koymaktadır. Bu çalışma, TÜBİTAK ARDEB (Proje No: 114E053) ve İÜ-BAP (Proje No: 1567/42362) tarafından desteklenmiştir. Anahtar Kelimeler: Alzheimer hastalığı, olağan durum ağı, dikkat çekerlik ağı, fonksiyonel bağlantısallık, manyetik rezonans görüntülem