13,789 research outputs found
Bayesian inference for queueing networks and modeling of internet services
Modern Internet services, such as those at Google, Yahoo!, and Amazon, handle
billions of requests per day on clusters of thousands of computers. Because
these services operate under strict performance requirements, a statistical
understanding of their performance is of great practical interest. Such
services are modeled by networks of queues, where each queue models one of the
computers in the system. A key challenge is that the data are incomplete,
because recording detailed information about every request to a heavily used
system can require unacceptable overhead. In this paper we develop a Bayesian
perspective on queueing models in which the arrival and departure times that
are not observed are treated as latent variables. Underlying this viewpoint is
the observation that a queueing model defines a deterministic transformation
between the data and a set of independent variables called the service times.
With this viewpoint in hand, we sample from the posterior distribution over
missing data and model parameters using Markov chain Monte Carlo. We evaluate
our framework on data from a benchmark Web application. We also present a
simple technique for selection among nested queueing models. We are unaware of
any previous work that considers inference in networks of queues in the
presence of missing data.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/10-AOAS392 the Annals of
Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
Inference and Learning in Networks of Queues
Probabilistic models of the performance of computer systems are useful both for predicting system performance in new conditions, and for diagnosing past performance problems. The most popular performance models are networks of queues. However, no current methods exist for parameter estimation or inference in networks of queues with missing data. In this paper, we present a novel viewpoint that combines queueing networks and graphical models, allowing Markov chain Monte Carlo to be applied. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our sampler on real-world data from a benchmark Web application.
Probabilistic Inference in Queueing Networks
Although queueing models have long been used to model the performance of computer systems, they are out of favor with practitioners, because they have a reputation for requiring unrealistic distributional assumptions. In fact, these distributional assumptions are used mainly to facilitate analytic approximations such as asymptotics and large-deviations bounds. In this paper, we analyze queueing networks from the probabilistic modeling perspective, applying inference methods from graphical models that afford significantly more modeling flexibility. In particular, we present a Gibbs sampler and stochastic EM algorithm for networks of M/M/1 FIFO queues. As an application of this technique, we localize performance problems in distributed systems from incomplete system trace data. On both synthetic networks and an actual distributed Web application, the model accurately recovers the system’s service time using 1 % of the available trace data.
An experimental study of the oxidation of graphite in high-temperature supersonic and hypersonic environments
Graphite oxidation in high temperature supersonic and hypersonic streams of air and air-nitrogen mixture
Hybrid mean field and real space model for vacancy diffusion-mediated annealing of radiation defects
In a fusion or advanced fission reactor, high energy neutrons induce the
formation of extended defect clusters in structural component materials,
degrading their properties over time. Such damage can be partially recovered
via a thermal annealing treatment. Therefore, for the design and operation of
fusion and advanced fission nuclear energy systems it is critical to estimate
and predict the annealing timescales for arbitrary configurations of defect
clusters. In our earlier paper [I. Rovelli, S. L. Dudarev, and A. P. Sutton, J.
Mech. Phys. Solids 103, 121 (2017)] we extended the Green function formulation
by Gu, Xiang et al. [Y. Gu, Y. Xiang, S. S. Quek, and D. J. Srolovitz, J. Mech.
Phys. Solids 83, 319 (2015)] for the climb of curved dislocations, to include
the evaporation and growth of cavities and vacancy clusters, and take into
account the effect of free surfaces. In this work, we further develop this
model to include the effect of radiation defects that are below the
experimental detection limit, via a mean field approach coupled with an
explicit treatment of the evolution of discrete defect clusters distributed in
real space. We show that randomly distributed small defects screen diffusive
interactions between larger discrete clusters. The evolution of the coupled
system is modelled self-consistently. We also simulate the evolution of defects
in an infinite laterally extended thin film, using the Ewald summation of
screened Yukawa-type diffusive propagators
Molecular Energy Transfer and Spectroscopy
Contains research objectives and reports on one research project.National Science Foundation (Grant GP-6504)Petroleum Research Fund (Grant 2523-A5)Sloan Foundation for Basic Research (M.I.T. Grant
Online Meta-learning by Parallel Algorithm Competition
The efficiency of reinforcement learning algorithms depends critically on a
few meta-parameters that modulates the learning updates and the trade-off
between exploration and exploitation. The adaptation of the meta-parameters is
an open question in reinforcement learning, which arguably has become more of
an issue recently with the success of deep reinforcement learning in
high-dimensional state spaces. The long learning times in domains such as Atari
2600 video games makes it not feasible to perform comprehensive searches of
appropriate meta-parameter values. We propose the Online Meta-learning by
Parallel Algorithm Competition (OMPAC) method. In the OMPAC method, several
instances of a reinforcement learning algorithm are run in parallel with small
differences in the initial values of the meta-parameters. After a fixed number
of episodes, the instances are selected based on their performance in the task
at hand. Before continuing the learning, Gaussian noise is added to the
meta-parameters with a predefined probability. We validate the OMPAC method by
improving the state-of-the-art results in stochastic SZ-Tetris and in standard
Tetris with a smaller, 1010, board, by 31% and 84%, respectively, and
by improving the results for deep Sarsa() agents in three Atari 2600
games by 62% or more. The experiments also show the ability of the OMPAC method
to adapt the meta-parameters according to the learning progress in different
tasks.Comment: 15 pages, 10 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with
arXiv:1702.0311
Search for direct production of charginos, neutralinos and sleptons in final states with two leptons and missing transverse momentum in pp collisions at √s = 8TeV with the ATLAS detector
Searches for the electroweak production of charginos, neutralinos and sleptons in final states characterized by the presence of two leptons (electrons and muons) and missing transverse momentum are performed using 20.3 fb−1 of proton-proton collision data at s√ = 8 TeV recorded with the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. No significant excess beyond Standard Model expectations is observed. Limits are set on the masses of the lightest chargino, next-to-lightest neutralino and sleptons for different lightest-neutralino mass hypotheses in simplified models. Results are also interpreted in various scenarios of the phenomenological Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model
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