864 research outputs found
PaRiS: Causally Consistent Transactions with Non-blocking Reads and Partial Replication
Geo-replicated data platforms are at the backbone of several large-scale
online services. Transactional Causal Consistency (TCC) is an attractive
consistency level for building such platforms. TCC avoids many anomalies of
eventual consistency, eschews the synchronization costs of strong consistency,
and supports interactive read-write transactions. Partial replication is
another attractive design choice for building geo-replicated platforms, as it
increases the storage capacity and reduces update propagation costs. This paper
presents PaRiS, the first TCC system that supports partial replication and
implements non-blocking parallel read operations, whose latency is paramount
for the performance of read-intensive applications. PaRiS relies on a novel
protocol to track dependencies, called Universal Stable Time (UST). By means of
a lightweight background gossip process, UST identifies a snapshot of the data
that has been installed by every DC in the system. Hence, transactions can
consistently read from such a snapshot on any server in any replication site
without having to block. Moreover, PaRiS requires only one timestamp to track
dependencies and define transactional snapshots, thereby achieving resource
efficiency and scalability. We evaluate PaRiS on a large-scale AWS deployment
composed of up to 10 replication sites. We show that PaRiS scales well with the
number of DCs and partitions, while being able to handle larger data-sets than
existing solutions that assume full replication. We also demonstrate a
performance gain of non-blocking reads vs. a blocking alternative (up to 1.47x
higher throughput with 5.91x lower latency for read-dominated workloads and up
to 1.46x higher throughput with 20.56x lower latency for write-heavy
workloads)
Okapi: Causally Consistent Geo-Replication Made Faster, Cheaper and More Available
Okapi is a new causally consistent geo-replicated key- value store. Okapi
leverages two key design choices to achieve high performance. First, it relies
on hybrid logical/physical clocks to achieve low latency even in the presence
of clock skew. Second, Okapi achieves higher resource efficiency and better
availability, at the expense of a slight increase in update visibility latency.
To this end, Okapi implements a new stabilization protocol that uses a
combination of vector and scalar clocks and makes a remote update visible when
its delivery has been acknowledged by every data center. We evaluate Okapi with
different workloads on Amazon AWS, using three geographically distributed
regions and 96 nodes. We compare Okapi with two recent approaches to causal
consistency, Cure and GentleRain. We show that Okapi delivers up to two orders
of magnitude better performance than GentleRain and that Okapi achieves up to
3.5x lower latency and a 60% reduction of the meta-data overhead with respect
to Cure
Positive balancing service by solar virtual power plants
During the past years, a large amount of photovoltaic (PV) capacity has been installed in Belgium. The main driver for this was the abundant government support (GreenPower Certicates). However, during the last few years, the support for new installations has been withdrawn and new PV capacity ceased. In previous research, it has been proven that selling PV energy of existing plants directly on the wholesale market is not feasible due to the large share of green power certicates awarded to these plants. However, the price of green power certicates has dropped signicantly and hence the balance between certicate and commodity revenue is restored. This paper investigates the possibility of providing positive balancing services to the transmission system operator by aggregating solar power in a technical Virtual Power Plant. The paper concludes that it seems not interesting, neither economically nor energetically, to keep solar plants solely for positive balancing purposes. Combination of solar power with other sources or consumers can however be profitable, as solar power is quickly switched in case it is needed to react fast
Control of storage elements in an Islanded microgrid with voltage-based control of DG units and loads
Drivers, bottlenecks and opportunities for virtual power plants in the Belgian electricity system
Smart microgrids and virtual power plants in a hierarchical control structure
In order to achieve a coordinated integration of distributed energy resources in the electrical network, an aggregation of these resources is required. Microgrids and virtual power plants (VPPs) address this issue. Opposed to VPPs, microgrids have the functionality of islanding, for which specific control strategies have been developed. These control strategies are classified under the primary control strategies. Microgrid secondary control deals with other aspects such as resource allocation, economic optimization and voltage profile improvements. When focussing on the control-aspects of DER, VPP coordination is similar with the microgrid secondary control strategy, and thus, operates at a slower time frame as compared to the primary control and can take full advantage of the available communication provided by the overlaying smart grid. Therefore, the feasibility of the microgrid secondary control for application in VPPs is discussed in this paper. A hierarchical control structure is presented in which, firstly, smart microgrids deal with local issues in a primary and secondary control. Secondly, these microgrids are aggregated in a VPP that enables the tertiary control, forming the link with the electricity markets and dealing with issues on a larger scale
- …