BriskStream: Scaling Data Stream Processing on Shared-Memory Multicore Architectures

We introduce BriskStream, an in-memory data stream processing system (DSPSs) specifically designed for modern shared-memory multicore architectures. BriskStream's key contribution is an execution plan optimization paradigm, namely RLAS, which takes relative-location (i.e., NUMA distance) of each pair of producer-consumer operators into consideration. We propose a branch and bound based approach with three heuristics to resolve the resulting nontrivial optimization problem. The experimental evaluations demonstrate that BriskStream yields much higher throughput and better scalability than existing DSPSs on multi-core architectures when processing different types of workloads.Comment: To appear in SIGMOD'1

Cost-Aware Partitioning for Efficient Large Graph Processing in Geo-Distributed Datacenters

International audienceGraph processing is an emerging computation model for a wide range of applications and graph partitioning is important for optimizing the cost and performance of graph processing jobs. Recently, many graph applications store their data on geo-distributed datacenters (DCs) to provide services worldwide with low latency. This raises new challenges to existing graph partitioning methods, due to the multi-level heterogeneities in network bandwidth and communication prices in geo-distributed DCs. In this paper, we propose an efficient graph partitioning method named Geo-Cut, which takes both the cost and performance objectives into consideration for large graph processing in geo-distributed DCs.Geo-Cut adopts two optimization stages. First, we propose a cost-aware streaming heuristic and utilize the one-pass streaming graph partitioning method to quickly assign edges to different DCs while minimizing inter-DC data communication cost. Second, we propose two partition refinement heuristics which identify the performance bottlenecks of geo-distributed graph processing and refine the partitioning result obtained in the first stage to reduce the inter-DC data transfer time while satisfying the budget constraint. Geo-Cut can be also applied to partition dynamic graphs thanks to its lightweight runtime overhead. We evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of Geo-Cut using real-world graphs with both real geo-distributed DCs and simulations. Evaluation results show that Geo-Cut can reduce the inter-DC data transfer time by up to 79% (42% as the median) and reduce the monetary cost by up to 75% (26% as the median) compared to state-of-the-art graph partitioning methods with a low overhead

Incorporating Probabilistic Optimizations for Resource Provisioning of Data Processing Workflows

International audienceWorkflow is an important model for big data processing and resource provisioning is crucial to the performance of workflows. Recently, system variations in the cloud and large-scale clusters, such as those in I/O and network performances, have been observed to greatly affect the performance of workflows. Traditional resource provisioning methods, which overlook these variations, can lead to suboptimal resource provisioning results. In this paper, we provide a general solution for workflow performance optimizations considering system variations. Specifically, we model system variations as time-dependent random variables and take their probability distributions as optimization input. Despite its effectiveness, this solution involves heavy computation overhead. Thus, we propose three pruning techniques to simplify workflow structure and reduce the probability evaluation overhead. We implement our techniques in a runtime library, which allows users to incorporate efficient probabilistic optimization into existing resource provisioning methods. Experiments show that probabilistic solutions can improve the performance by 51% compared to state-of-the-art static solutions while guaranteeing budget constraint, and our pruning techniques can greatly reduce the overhead of probabilistic optimization

Reliable and Efficient In-Memory Fault Tolerance of Large Language Model Pretraining

Extensive system scales (i.e. thousands of GPU/TPUs) and prolonged training periods (i.e. months of pretraining) significantly escalate the probability of failures when training large language models (LLMs). Thus, efficient and reliable fault-tolerance methods are in urgent need. Checkpointing is the primary fault-tolerance method to periodically save parameter snapshots from GPU memory to disks via CPU memory. In this paper, we identify the frequency of existing checkpoint-based fault-tolerance being significantly limited by the storage I/O overheads, which results in hefty re-training costs on restarting from the nearest checkpoint. In response to this gap, we introduce an in-memory fault-tolerance framework for large-scale LLM pretraining. The framework boosts the efficiency and reliability of fault tolerance from three aspects: (1) Reduced Data Transfer and I/O: By asynchronously caching parameters, i.e., sharded model parameters, optimizer states, and RNG states, to CPU volatile memory, Our framework significantly reduces communication costs and bypasses checkpoint I/O. (2) Enhanced System Reliability: Our framework enhances parameter protection with a two-layer hierarchy: snapshot management processes (SMPs) safeguard against software failures, together with Erasure Coding (EC) protecting against node failures. This double-layered protection greatly improves the survival probability of the parameters compared to existing checkpointing methods. (3) Improved Snapshotting Frequency: Our framework achieves more frequent snapshotting compared with asynchronous checkpointing optimizations under the same saving time budget, which improves the fault tolerance efficiency. Empirical results demonstrate that Our framework minimizes the overhead of fault tolerance of LLM pretraining by effectively leveraging redundant CPU resources.Comment: Fault Tolerance, Checkpoint Optimization, Large Language Model, 3D parallelis

The Changing Landscape for Stroke\ua0Prevention in AF: Findings From the GLORIA-AF Registry Phase 2

Background GLORIA-AF (Global Registry on Long-Term Oral Antithrombotic Treatment in Patients with Atrial Fibrillation) is a prospective, global registry program describing antithrombotic treatment patterns in patients with newly diagnosed nonvalvular atrial fibrillation at risk of stroke. Phase 2 began when dabigatran, the first non\u2013vitamin K antagonist oral anticoagulant (NOAC), became available. Objectives This study sought to describe phase 2 baseline data and compare these with the pre-NOAC era collected during phase 1. Methods During phase 2, 15,641 consenting patients were enrolled (November 2011 to December 2014); 15,092 were eligible. This pre-specified cross-sectional analysis describes eligible patients\u2019 baseline characteristics. Atrial fibrillation disease characteristics, medical outcomes, and concomitant diseases and medications were collected. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics. Results Of the total patients, 45.5% were female; median age was 71 (interquartile range: 64, 78) years. Patients were from Europe (47.1%), North America (22.5%), Asia (20.3%), Latin America (6.0%), and the Middle East/Africa (4.0%). Most had high stroke risk (CHA2DS2-VASc [Congestive heart failure, Hypertension, Age  6575 years, Diabetes mellitus, previous Stroke, Vascular disease, Age 65 to 74 years, Sex category] score  652; 86.1%); 13.9% had moderate risk (CHA2DS2-VASc = 1). Overall, 79.9% received oral anticoagulants, of whom 47.6% received NOAC and 32.3% vitamin K antagonists (VKA); 12.1% received antiplatelet agents; 7.8% received no antithrombotic treatment. For comparison, the proportion of phase 1 patients (of N = 1,063 all eligible) prescribed VKA was 32.8%, acetylsalicylic acid 41.7%, and no therapy 20.2%. In Europe in phase 2, treatment with NOAC was more common than VKA (52.3% and 37.8%, respectively); 6.0% of patients received antiplatelet treatment; and 3.8% received no antithrombotic treatment. In North America, 52.1%, 26.2%, and 14.0% of patients received NOAC, VKA, and antiplatelet drugs, respectively; 7.5% received no antithrombotic treatment. NOAC use was less common in Asia (27.7%), where 27.5% of patients received VKA, 25.0% antiplatelet drugs, and 19.8% no antithrombotic treatment. Conclusions The baseline data from GLORIA-AF phase 2 demonstrate that in newly diagnosed nonvalvular atrial fibrillation patients, NOAC have been highly adopted into practice, becoming more frequently prescribed than VKA in Europe and North America. Worldwide, however, a large proportion of patients remain undertreated, particularly in Asia and North America. (Global Registry on Long-Term Oral Antithrombotic Treatment in Patients With Atrial Fibrillation [GLORIA-AF]; NCT01468701

Improving the Effectiveness of Burst Buffers for Big Data Processing in HPC Systems with Eley

International audienceBurst Buffer is an effective solution for reducing the data transfer time and the I/O interference in HPC systems. Extending Burst Buffers (BBs) to handle Big Data applications is challenging because BBs must account for the large data inputs of Big Data applications and the Quality-of-Service (QoS) of HPC applications – which are considered as first-class citizens in HPC systems. Existing BBs focus on only intermediate data of Big Data applications and incur a high performance degradation of both Big Data and HPC applications. We present Eley, a burst buffer solution that helps to accelerate the performance of Big Data applications while guaranteeing the QoS of HPC applications. To achieve this goal, Eley embraces interference-aware prefetching technique that makes reading data input faster while introducing low interference for HPC applications. Evaluations using a wide range of Big Data and HPC applications demonstrate that Eley improves the performance of Big Data applications by up to 30% compared to existing BBs while maintaining the QoS of HPC applications

Monetary Cost Optimizations for Hosting Workflow-as-a-Service in IaaS Clouds

10.1109/TCC.2015.2404807IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CLOUD COMPUTING4134-4

A Taxonomy and Survey of Scientific Computing in the Cloud

International audienceCloud computing has evolved as a popular computing infrastructure for many applications. With (big) data acquiring a crucial role in eScience, efforts have been made recently exploring how to efficiently develop and deploy scientific applications on the unprecedentedly scalable cloud infrastructures. We review recent efforts in developing and deploying scientific computing applications in the cloud. In particular, we introduce a taxonomy specifically designed for scientific computing in the cloud, and further review the taxonomy with four major kinds of science applications, including life sciences, physics sciences, social and humanities sciences, and climate and earth sciences. Due to the large data size in most scientific applications, the performance of I/O operations can greatly affect the overall performance of the applications. We notice that, the dynamic I/O performance of the cloud has made the resource provisioning an important and complex problem for scientific applications in the cloud. We present our efforts on improving the resource provisioning efficiency and effectiveness of scientific applications in the cloud. Finally, we present the open problems for developing the next-generation eScience applications and systems in the cloud and conclude this chapter