Towards extending the SWITCH platform for time-critical, cloud-based CUDA applications: Job scheduling parameters influencing performance

SWITCH (Software Workbench for Interactive, Time Critical and Highly self-adaptive cloud applications) allows for the development and deployment of real-time applications in the cloud, but it does not yet support instances backed by Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). Wanting to explore how SWITCH might support CUDA (a GPU architecture) in the future, we have undertaken a review of time-critical CUDA applications, discovering that run-time requirements (which we call ‘wall time’) are in many cases regarded as the most important. We have performed experiments to investigate which parameters have the greatest impact on wall time when running multiple Amazon Web Services GPU-backed instances. Although a maximum of 8 single-GPU instances can be launched in a single Amazon Region, launching just 2 instances rather than 1 gives a 42% decrease in wall time. Also, instances are often wasted doing nothing, and there is a moderately-strong relationship between how problems are distributed across instances and wall time. These findings can be used to enhance the SWITCH provision for specifying Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs); in the future, GPU-backed instances could be supported. These findings can also be used more generally, to optimise the balance between the computational resources needed and the resulting wall time to obtain results

Towards a methodology for creating time-critical, cloud-based CUDA applications

CUDA has been used in many different application domains, not all of which are specifically image processing related. There is the opportunity to use multiple and/or distributed CUDA resources in cloud facilities such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), in order to obtain enhanced processing power and to satisfy time-critical requirements which cannot be satisfied using a single CUDA resource. In particular, this would provide enhanced ability for processing Big Data, especially in conjunction with distributed file systems (for example). In this paper, we present a survey of time-critical CUDA applications, identifying requirements and concepts that they tend to have in common. In particular, we investigate the terminology used for Quality of Service metrics, and present a taxonomy which summarises the underlying concepts and maps these terms to the diverse terminology used. We also survey typical requirements for developing, deploying and managing such applications. Given these requirements, we consider how the SWITCH platform can in principle support the entire life-cycle of time-critical CUDA application development and cloud deployment, and identify specific extensions which would be needed in order fully to support this particular class of time-critical cloud applications

Combination keyboard and mouse

The object of this thesis is design and construction of a device that can replace a standard keyboard and mouse. The history of the standard keyboard is presented and the most known alternative the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard is described. The basic principals that August Dvorak used in designing his keyboard are also used in our design. In other to achieve this the knowledge of the characteristics of Slovenian language are required. The characteristics that we require to design our keyboard are presented in this work. This keyboard does not employ a full set of keys, it is a cording keyboard because characters are derived from combinations of keys. The procedure used to design our keyboard is also given in this thesis. The development of a keyboard requires knowledge of the USB protocol and the standard HID that defines a class of devices named Human Interface Devices. The requirements that the device has to meet to successfully communicate over the Universal Serial Bus. The descriptors that help the host learn about the device are also briefly explained. A full design of the keyboard and mouse based around the Microchip's PIC18F4550 microcontroler serves as an example for the realization of the device. The circuits needed to build a functional device connected to the USB are listed and the basic program is outlined as are the specific parts and code that are used in this project

Deutsch-slovenisches Wörterbuch

Theil 1: A-

Quality of service models for microservices and their itegration into the SWITCH IDE

As demands on new software increase, new approaches are needed to help developers ensure Quality of Service (QoS) for their offered service. In this paper we present a QoS modeling approach that complements and extends the standard microservice and component-based software engineering tools by giving the software engineer information on what Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs) and quality constraints have critical influence on QoS. This concept extends the co-programing concept of programing the software and infrastructure with the ability to do this in a more informed manner. The result of this are Qualitative Metadata Markers (QMM) that provide guidelines for changing the infrastructure that can be used by humans or specialized decision-making algorithms

Support for full life cycle cloud-native application management: Dynamic TOSCA and SWITCH IDE

Motivated by the complexity and difficulty of engineering time-critical cloud applications, we investigated the methodology and software workbench to provide full application life cycle support to the software engineer. For this purpose we present a novel high-level concept that is concentrated on exchanging the complex, dynamic data using OASIS TOSCA standard, mainly used in static contexts. This methodology enables specifying an application logic, provisioning, deploying, monitoring, and dynamical adaptation to changing conditions. It can be applied effectively to the interchange of dynamically changing data in order to maintain Quality of Service. By extending TOSCA with dynamic mapping of Qualify of Service and runtime attributes related to the application and underlying architecture we show that TOSCA can be used to exchange data and reconfigure on-demand compute resources whilst the application is in the process of design, infrastructure provisioning, runtime or adaptation. To demonstrate that our novel research contributions can be realised, we implemented SWITCH IDE, which showcases this concept through its development workflow which offers application and underlying infrastructure description, manipulation and reconfiguration of QoS and runtime attributes. Our approach differs in that it supports the concept of dynamic TOSCA by directly enabling application runtime to be reconfigured on the fly