ARM Wrestling with Big Data: A Study of Commodity ARM64 Server for Big Data Workloads

ARM processors have dominated the mobile device market in the last decade due to their favorable computing to energy ratio. In this age of Cloud data centers and Big Data analytics, the focus is increasingly on power efficient processing, rather than just high throughput computing. ARM's first commodity server-grade processor is the recent AMD A1100-series processor, based on a 64-bit ARM Cortex A57 architecture. In this paper, we study the performance and energy efficiency of a server based on this ARM64 CPU, relative to a comparable server running an AMD Opteron 3300-series x64 CPU, for Big Data workloads. Specifically, we study these for Intel's HiBench suite of web, query and machine learning benchmarks on Apache Hadoop v2.7 in a pseudo-distributed setup, for data sizes up to $20GB$ files, $5M$ web pages and $500M$ tuples. Our results show that the ARM64 server's runtime performance is comparable to the x64 server for integer-based workloads like Sort and Hive queries, and only lags behind for floating-point intensive benchmarks like PageRank, when they do not exploit data parallelism adequately. We also see that the ARM64 server takes $\frac{1}{3}^{rd}$ the energy, and has an Energy Delay Product (EDP) that is $50-71\%$ lower than the x64 server. These results hold promise for ARM64 data centers hosting Big Data workloads to reduce their operational costs, while opening up opportunities for further analysis.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the 24th IEEE International Conference on High Performance Computing, Data, and Analytics (HiPC), 201

Truthful Facility Assignment with Resource Augmentation: An Exact Analysis of Serial Dictatorship

We study the truthful facility assignment problem, where a set of agents with private most-preferred points on a metric space are assigned to facilities that lie on the metric space, under capacity constraints on the facilities. The goal is to produce such an assignment that minimizes the social cost, i.e., the total distance between the most-preferred points of the agents and their corresponding facilities in the assignment, under the constraint of truthfulness, which ensures that agents do not misreport their most-preferred points. We propose a resource augmentation framework, where a truthful mechanism is evaluated by its worst-case performance on an instance with enhanced facility capacities against the optimal mechanism on the same instance with the original capacities. We study a very well-known mechanism, Serial Dictatorship, and provide an exact analysis of its performance. Although Serial Dictatorship is a purely combinatorial mechanism, our analysis uses linear programming; a linear program expresses its greedy nature as well as the structure of the input, and finds the input instance that enforces the mechanism have its worst-case performance. Bounding the objective of the linear program using duality arguments allows us to compute tight bounds on the approximation ratio. Among other results, we prove that Serial Dictatorship has approximation ratio $g/(g-2)$ when the capacities are multiplied by any integer $g \geq 3$. Our results suggest that even a limited augmentation of the resources can have wondrous effects on the performance of the mechanism and in particular, the approximation ratio goes to 1 as the augmentation factor becomes large. We complement our results with bounds on the approximation ratio of Random Serial Dictatorship, the randomized version of Serial Dictatorship, when there is no resource augmentation

Forests Fanned by Waves: Embodied Ways of Knowing in a Mangrove Landscape

This narrative article explores a boatman's intimate relationship with the mangrove forests he had grown up with from his childhood. The author listens to the boatman's stories  about his life when he is in his sixties. How he assessed the author also implied what part of his world the author would be invited to see.  This is a narrative of warmth and friendship built through traversing the mangrove forest in a handmade raft, watching birdlife, lotuses and other mangrove species. The narrative captures the ecosophy of this boatman in his lived and embodied experience

Creep, Fatigue and Creep-Fatigue Interactions in Modified 9% Cr - 1% Mo (P91) Steels

Grade P91 steel, from the class of advanced high-chrome ferritic steels, is one of the preferred materials for many elevated temperature structural components. Creep-fatigue (C-F) interactions, along with oxidation, can accelerate the kinetics of damage accumulation and consequently reduce such components\u27 life. Hence, reliable C-F test data is required for meticulous consideration of C-F interactions and oxidation, which in turn is vital for sound design practices. It is also imperative to develop analytical constitutive models that can simulate and predict material response under various long-term in-service conditions using experimental data from short-term laboratory experiments. Consequently, the major objectives of the proposed research are to characterize the creep, fatigue and C-F behavior of grade P91 steels at 625 C and develop robust constitutive models for simulating/predicting their microstructural response under different loading conditions. This work will utilize experimental data from 16 laboratories worldwide that conducted tests (creep, fatigue and C-F) on grade P91 steel at 625°C in a round-robin (RR) program. Along with 7 creep deformation and rupture tests, 32 pure fatigue and 46 C-F tests from the RR are considered in this work. A phenomenological constitutive model formulated in this work needs just five fitting parameters to simulate/predict the monotonic, pure fatigue and C-F behavior of grade P91 at 625 C. A modified version of an existing constitutive model is also presented for particularly simulating its isothermal creep deformation and rupture behavior. Experimental results indicate that specimen C-F lives, as measured by the 2% load drop criterion, seem to decrease with increasing strain ranges and increasing hold times at 625°C. Metallographic assessment of the tested specimens shows that the damage mode in both pure fatigue and 600 seconds hold time cyclic tests is predominantly transgranular fatigue with some presence of oxidation spikes. The damage mode in 1800 second hold time cyclic tests is an interaction of transgranular fatigue with dominant oxide spikes and creep cavitation. Other experimental results including the statistical analysis and inter- and intra-laboratory variability in the C-F lifetimes are provided in the text. Scatter factor for any of creep, monotonic, pure fatigue and C-F simulations is shown to be at a maximum of ~ 1.3, in comparison to \u3e 5 expected for a RR. Moreover, the microstructural variability between nominally homogeneous specimens can be inherently accounted by the formulated constitutive model