Flash Pyrolysis Products From Beech Wood

Flash pyrolysis products from beech wood obtained in an original pyrolysis apparatus were analyzed. The analytical procedure is described, and the composition of pyrolytic oil presented with more than 50 compounds. Comparison of pyrolytic products of cellulose, hemicellulose, and wood indicates the origin of each product

Approximation Algorithms for Energy Minimization in Cloud Service Allocation under Reliability Constraints

We consider allocation problems that arise in the context of service allocation in Clouds. More specifically, we assume on the one part that each computing resource is associated to a capacity constraint, that can be chosen using Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) method, and to a probability of failure. On the other hand, we assume that the service runs as a set of independent instances of identical Virtual Machines. Moreover, there exists a Service Level Agreement (SLA) between the Cloud provider and the client that can be expressed as follows: the client comes with a minimal number of service instances which must be alive at the end of the day, and the Cloud provider offers a list of pairs (price,compensation), this compensation being paid by the Cloud provider if it fails to keep alive the required number of services. On the Cloud provider side, each pair corresponds actually to a guaranteed success probability of fulfilling the constraint on the minimal number of instances. In this context, given a minimal number of instances and a probability of success, the question for the Cloud provider is to find the number of necessary resources, their clock frequency and an allocation of the instances (possibly using replication) onto machines. This solution should satisfy all types of constraints during a given time period while minimizing the energy consumption of used resources. We consider two energy consumption models based on DVFS techniques, where the clock frequency of physical resources can be changed. For each allocation problem and each energy model, we prove deterministic approximation ratios on the consumed energy for algorithms that provide guaranteed probability failures, as well as an efficient heuristic, whose energy ratio is not guaranteed

What Makes Affinity-Based Schedulers So Efficient ?

The tremendous increase in the size and heterogeneity of supercomputers makes it very difficult to predict the performance of a scheduling algorithm. Therefore, dynamic solutions, where scheduling decisions are made at runtime have overpassed static allocation strategies. The simplicity and efficiency of dynamic schedulers such as Hadoop are a key of the success of the MapReduce framework. Dynamic schedulers such as StarPU, PaRSEC or StarSs are also developed for more constrained computations, e.g. task graphs coming from linear algebra. To make their decisions, these runtime systems make use of some static information, such as the distance of tasks to the critical path or the affinity between tasks and computing resources (CPU, GPU,\ldots) and of dynamic information, such as where input data are actually located. In this paper, we concentrate on two elementary linear algebra kernels, namely the outer product and the matrix multiplication. For each problem, we propose several dynamic strategies that can be used at runtime and we provide an analytic study of their theoretical performance. We prove that the theoretical analysis provides very good estimate of the amount of communications induced by a dynamic strategy, thus enabling to choose among them for a given problem and architecture

Static Scheduling Strategies for Heterogeneous Systems

In this paper, we consider static scheduling techniques for heterogeneous systems, such as clusters and grids. We successively deal with minimum makespan scheduling, divisible load scheduling and steady-state scheduling. Finally, we discuss the limitations of static scheduling approaches

Peer to peer multidimensional overlays: Approximating complex structures

Peer to peer overlay networks have proven to be a good support for storing and retrieving data in a fully decentralized way. A sound approach is to structure them in such a way that they reflect the structure of the application. Peers represent objects of the application so that neighbours in the peer to peer network are objects having similar characteristics from the application's point of view. Such structured peer to peer overlay networks provide a natural support for range queries. While some complex structures such as a Voronoï tessellation, where each peer is associated to a cell in the space, are clearly relevant to structure the objects, the associated cost to compute and maintain these structures is usually extremely high for dimensions larger than 2. We argue that an approximation of a complex structure is enough to provide a native support of range queries. This stems fromthe fact that neighbours are importantwhile the exact space partitioning associated to a given peer is not as crucial. In this paper we present the design, analysis and evaluation of RayNet, a loosely structured Voronoï-based overlay network. RayNet organizes peers in an approximation of a Voronoï tessellation in a fully decentralized way. It relies on a Monte-Carlo algorithm to estimate the size of a cell and on an epidemic protocol to discover neighbours. In order to ensure efficient (polylogarithmic) routing, RayNet is inspired from the Kleinberg's small world model where each peer gets connected to close neighbours (its approximate Voronoï neighbours in Raynet) and shortcuts, long range neighbours, implemented using an existing Kleinberg-like peer sampling

Independent and Divisible Task Scheduling on Heterogeneous Star-shaped Platforms with Limited Memory

In this paper, we consider the problem of allocating and scheduling a collection of independent, equal-sized tasks on heterogeneous star-shaped platforms. We also address the same problem for divisible tasks. For both cases, we take memory constraints into account. We prove strong NP-completeness results for different objective functions, namely makespan minimization and throughput maximization, on simple star-shaped platforms. We propose an approximation algorithm based on the unconstrained version (with unlimited memory) of the problem. We introduce several heuristics, which are evaluated and compared through extensive simulations. An unexpected conclusion drawn from these experiments is that classical scheduling heuristics that try to greedily minimize the completion time of each task are outperformed by the simple heuristic that consists in assigning the task to the available processor that has the smallest communication time, regardless of computation power (hence a "bandwidth-centric" distribution).Dans ce rapport, nous nous intéressons au problème de l’allocation d’un grand nombre de taches indépendantes et de taille identiques sur des plateformes de calcul hétérogènes organisées en étoile. Nous nous intéressons également au modèle des tâches divisibles. Pour ces deux modèles, nous prenons en compte les contraintes mémoires et démontrons des résultats de NP-complétude pour diverses métriques (le «makespakan» et le débit). Nous proposons un algorithme d’approximation basé sur la version non-contrainte (c’est-`a-dire avec une mémoire infinie) du problème. Nous proposons également d’autres heuristiques que nous évaluons à l’aide d’un grand nombre de simulations. Une conclusion inattendue qui ressort de ces expériences est que les heuristiques de listes classiques qui essaient de minimiser gloutonnement la durée de l’ordonnancement sont bien moins performantes que l’heuristique toute simple consistant à envoyer les tâches aux processeurs disponibles ayant le temps de communication le plus faible, sans même tenir compte de leur puissance de calcu

Link-Heterogeneity vs. Node-Heterogeneity in Clusters

International audienceHeterogeneity in resources pervades all modern computing platforms. How do the effects of heterogeneity depend on which resources differ among computers in a platform? Some answers are derived within a formal framework, by comparing heterogeneity in computing power (node-heterogeneity) with heterogeneity in communication speed (link-heterogeneity). The former genre of heterogeneity seems much easier to understand than the latter

On the Importance of Bandwidth Control Mechanisms for Scheduling on Large Scale Heterogeneous Platforms

We study three scheduling problems (file redistribution, independent tasks scheduling and broadcasting) on large scale heterogeneous platforms under the Bounded Multi-port Model. In this model, each node is associated to an incoming and outgoing bandwidth and it can be involved in an arbitrary number of communications, provided that neither its incoming nor its outgoing bandwidths are exceeded. This model well corresponds to modern networking technologies, it can be used when programming at TCP level and is also implemented in modern message passing libraries such as MPICH2. We prove, using the three above mentioned scheduling problems, that this model is tractable and that even very simple distributed algorithms can achieve optimal performance, provided that we can enforce bandwidth sharing policies. Our goal is to assert the necessity of such QoS mechanisms, that are now available in the kernels of modern operating systems, to achieve optimal performance. We prove that implementations of optimal algorithms that do not enforce prescribed bandwidth sharing can fail by a large amount if TCP contention mechanisms only are used. More precisely, for each considered scheduling problem, we establish upper bounds on the performance loss than can be induced by TCP bandwidth sharing mechanisms, we prove that these upper bounds are tight by exhibiting instances achieving them and we provide a set of simulations using SimGRID to analyze the practical impact of bandwidth control mechanisms