Deadlock detection in MPI programs

The Message‐Passing Interface (MPI) is commonly used to write parallel programs for distributed memory parallel computers. MPI‐CHECK is a tool developed to aid in the debugging of MPI programs that are written in free or fixed format Fortran 90 and Fortran 77. This paper presents the methods used in MPI‐CHECK 2.0 to detect many situations where actual and potential deadlocks occur when using blocking and non‐blocking point‐to‐point routines as well as when using collective routines. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Lightweight monitoring of MPI programs in real time

Current technologies allow efficient data collection by several sensors to determine an overall evaluation of the status of a cluster. However, no previous work of which we are aware analyzes the behavior of the parallel programs themselves in real time. In this paper, we perform a comparison of different artificial intelligence techniques that can be used to implement a lightweight monitoring and analysis system for parallel applications on a cluster of Linux workstations. We study the accuracy and performance of deterministic and stochastic algorithms when we observe the flow of both library‐function and operating‐system calls of parallel programs written with C and MPI. We demonstrate that monitoring of MPI programs can be achieved with high accuracy and in some cases with a false‐positive rate near 0% in real time, and we show that the added computational load on each node is small. As an example, the monitoring of function calls using a hidden Markov model generates less than 5% overhead. The proposed system is able to automatically detect deviations of a process from its expected behavior in any node of the cluster, and thus it can be used as an anomaly detector, for performance monitoring to complement other systems or as a debugging tool. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Productivity prediction of MPI programs based on models

A model of parallel program that can be effectively interpreted on the development computer guaranteeing the possibility of a sufficiently precise prediction of real run time for a simulated parallel program at the prescribed computer system is studied. The model is worked out for parallel programs with explicit message passing written in the Java language with MPI library access and is included into the composition of ParJava environment. The model is obtained by transforming the program control tree that can be constructed for Java programs by modifying the abstract syntax tree. To model communication functions, the model LogGP is used which allows taking into consideration the specific character of the communication network of the distributed computer system.     

LogGPO: An accurate communication model for performance prediction of MPI programs

Message passing interface (MPI) is the de facto standard in writing parallel scientific applications on distributed memory systems. Performance prediction of MPI programs on current or future parallel systems can help to find system bottleneck or optimize programs. To effectively analyze and predict performance of a large and complex MPI program, an efficient and accurate communication model is highly needed. A series of communication models have been proposed, such as the LogP model family, which assume th...     

A technique for non-invasive application-level checkpointing

One of the key elements required for writing self-healing applications for distributed and dynamic computing environments is checkpointing. Checkpointing is a mechanism by which an application is made resilient to failures by storing its state periodically to the disk. The main goal of this research is to enable non-invasive reengineering of existing applications to insert Application-Level Checkpointing (ALC) mechanism. The Domain-Specific Language (DSL) developed in this research serves as a perfect means towards this end and is used for obtaining the ALC-specifications from the end-users. These specifications are used for generating and inserting the actual checkpointing code into the existing application. The performance of the application having the generated checkpointing code is comparable to the performance of the application in which the checkpointing code was inserted manually. With slight modifications, the DSL developed in this research can be used for specifying the ALC mechanism in several base languages (e.g., C/C++, Java, and FORTRAN).     

MPI‐CHECK: a tool for checking Fortran 90 MPI programs

MPI is commonly used to write parallel programs for distributed memory parallel computers. MPI‐CHECK is a tool developed to aid in the debugging of MPI programs that are written in free or fixed format Fortran 90 and Fortran 77. MPI‐CHECK provides automatic compile‐time and run‐time checking of MPI programs. MPI‐CHECK automatically detects the following problems in the use of MPI routines: (i) mismatch in argument type, kind, rank or number; (ii) messages which exceed the bounds of the source/destination array; (iii) negative message lengths; (iv) illegal MPI calls before MPI_INIT or after MPI_FINALIZE; (v) inconsistencies between the declared type of a message and its associated DATATYPE argument; and (vi) actual arguments which violate the INTENT attribute. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Net-dbx: a web-based debugger of MPI programs over low-bandwidthlines

This paper describes Net-dbx, a tool that utilizes Java and other World Wide Web tools for the debugging of MPI programs from anywhere in the Internet. Net-dbx is a source-level interactive debugger with the full power of gdb (the GNU Debugger) augmented with the debug functionality of the public-domain MPI implementation environments. The main effort was on a low overhead, yet powerful, graphical interface supported by low-bandwidth connections. The portability of the tool is of great importance as well because it enables the tool to be used on heterogeneous nodes that participate in an MPI multicomputer. Both needs are satisfied a great deal by the use of WWW browsing tools and the Java programming language. The user of our system simply points his/her browser to the Net-dbx page, logs in to the destination system, and starts debugging by interacting with the tool, just as with any GUI environment. The user can dynamically select which MPI processes to view/debug. A special WWW-based environment has been designed and implemented to host the system prototype     

内存列存储数据库中优化的混合自适应索引

分析型数据库在现代企业中得到广泛应用,在使用过程中对查询处理速度的要求逐渐提高。大数据环境下,分析型数据库面临一系列新的挑战:首先,数据复杂性与日俱增,使得数据库系统的初始配置任务更加繁重,例如索引创建等;其次,在分析过程中,由于查询负载模式无法预知,需要对某些属性反复构建索引,以满足查询的时间要求。显然,传统的索引构建维护技术不能完全满足新的应用环境。数据库分裂技术提出了一种不同的策略去解决这些问题。使用数据库分裂技术,DBA不需要对数据库进行细粒度的系统配置。在查询执行过程中,数据库能自动调整以适应查询负载;随着查询负载的变化,系统自动调整索引。近年来,一系列数据库分裂算法被提出,但已有的算法都各有优缺点。因此给出了一个cache conscious的数据库分裂代价模型,并基于该模型构建了一个新的自适应索引,其可以综合不同数据库分裂算法的优势。通过大量实验验证了这种新自适应索引技术的有效性。     

面向内存文件系统的数据一致性更新机制研究

近年来,研究界提出了多种管理新型存储级内存的内存文件系统,例如BPFS,PMFS和SIMFS。由于内存文件系统的设备访问方式和I/O路径不同于传统面向块设备的文件系统,适用于内存文件系统的数据一致性更新机制尚未得到很好的研究。为此,提出一种适用于内存文件系统的直接拷贝的数据一致性更新机制,讨论多种数据一致性更新机制在内存文件系统中的优缺点,并以内存文件系统SIMFS为基础,实现多种支持不同数据一致性更新机制的SIMFS版本。通过测试基准测试了各个SIMFS版本的性能,并分析了不同数据一致性更新机制对内存文件系统的整体性能的影响。实验结果表明,提出的直接拷贝机制在内存文件系统中取得了最好的性能。     

A grid middleware for distributed Java computing with MPI binding and process migration supports

“Grid” computing has emerged as an important new research field. With years of efforts, grid researchers have successfully developed grid technologies including security solutions,resource management protocols, information query protocols, and data management services. How-ever, as the ultimate goal of grid computing is to design an infrastructure which supports dynarnic,cross-organizational resource sharing, there is a need of solutions for efficient and transparent task re-scheduling in the grid. In this research, a new grid middleware is proposed, called G-JavaMPI. This middleware adds the parallel computing capability of Java to the grid with the support of a Grid-enabled message passing interface (MPI) for inter-process communication between Java processes executed at dif-ferent grid points. A special feature of the proposed G-JavaMPI is the support of Java process migration with post-migration message redirection. With these supports, it is possible to migrate executing Java process from site to site for continuous computation, if some site is scheduled to be turned down for system reconfiguration. Moreover, the proposed G-JavaMPI middleware is very portable since it requires no modification of underlying OS, Java virtual machine, and MPI package. Preliminary performance tests have been conducted. The proposed mechanisms have shown good migration efficiency in a simulated grid environment.     

MPI Correctness Checking for OpenMP/MPI Applications

The MPI interface is the de-facto standard for message passing applications, but it is also complex and defines several usage patterns as erroneous. A current trend is the investigation of hybrid programming techniques that use MPI processes and multiple threads per process. As a result, more and more MPI implementations support multi-threading, which are restricted by several rules of the MPI standard. In order to support developers of hybrid MPI applications, we present extensions to the MPI correctness checking tool Marmot. Basic extensions make it aware of OpenMP multi-threading, while further ones add new correctness checks. As a result, it is possible to detect errors that actually occur in a run with Marmot. However, some errors only occur for certain execution orders, thus, we present a novel approach using artificial data races, which allows us to employ thread checking tools, e.g., Intel Thread Checker, to detect MPI usage errors.     

MPI for Python

MPI for Python provides bindings of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard for the Python programming language and allows any Python program to exploit multiple processors. This package is constructed on top of the MPI-1 specification and defines an object-oriented interface which closely follows MPI-2 C++ bindings. It supports point-to-point (sends, receives) and collective (broadcasts, scatters, gathers) communications of general Python objects. Efficiency has been tested in a Beowulf class cluster and satisfying results were obtained. MPI for Python is open source and available for download on the web (http://www.cimec.org.ar/python).     

Lateral error recovery for media streaming in application-level multicast

We consider media streaming using application-level multicast (ALM) where packet loss has to be recovered via retransmission in a timely manner. Since packets may be lost due to congestion, node failures, and join and leave dynamics, traditional "vertical" recovery approach where upstream nodes retransmit the lost packets is no longer effective. We therefore propose lateral error recovery (LER). In LER, hosts are divided into a number of planes, each of which forms an independent ALM tree. Since error correlation across planes is low, a node effectively recovers its error by "laterally" requesting retransmission from nearby nodes in other planes. We present analysis on the complexity and recovery delay on LER. Using Internet-like topologies, we show via simulations that LER is an effective error recovery mechanism. It achieves low overhead in terms of delivery delay (i.e., relative delay penalty) and physical link stress. As compared with traditional recovery schemes, LER attains much lower residual loss rate (i.e., loss rate after retransmission) under a certain deadline constraint. The performance can be substantially improved in the presence of some reliable proxies.     

Distributed,application-level monitoring for heterogeneous clouds using stream processing

As utility computing is widely deployed, organizations and researchers are turning to the next generation of cloud systems: federating public clouds, integrating private and public clouds, and merging resources at all levels (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS). Adaptive systems can help address the challenge of managing this heterogeneous collection of resources. While services and libraries exist for basic management tasks that enable implementing decisions made by the manager, monitoring is an open challenge. We define a set of requirements for aggregating monitoring data from a heterogeneous collections of resources, sufficient to support adaptive systems. We present and implement an architecture using stream processing to provide near-realtime, cross-boundary, distributed, scalable, fault-tolerant monitoring. A case study illustrates the value of collecting and aggregating metrics from disparate sources. A set of experiments shows the feasibility of our prototype with regard to latency, overhead, and cost effectiveness.     

基于内存计算的钢铁价格预测算法研究

由于钢铁价格具有非线性和因子难以确定的特点,在数据挖掘预测分析时,传统的预测方法只能对钢铁价格进行小数据量的分析,这将导致预测精度低、速度慢、效率低下。随着大数据的深入研究,内存计算技术成为研究热点,用户对实时数据处理技术的需求越来越大。因此,在钢铁价格预测模型中,引入内存计算技术,提出基于内存计算的LM-BP神经网络预测算法,利用2002年到2010年的钢铁价格、产量、库存、GDP等数据建立预测模型。最后,仿真实验结果表明,基于内存计算的预测模型算法不仅速度快,而且精度高。     

Detecting application-level failures in component-based Internet services

Most Internet services (e-commerce, search engines, etc.) suffer faults. Quickly detecting these faults can be the largest bottleneck in improving availability of the system. We present Pinpoint, a methodology for automating fault detection in Internet services by: 1) observing low-level internal structural behaviors of the service; 2) modeling the majority behavior of the system as correct; and 3) detecting anomalies in these behaviors as possible symptoms of failures. Without requiring any a priori application-specific information, Pinpoint correctly detected 89%-96% of major failures in our experiments, as compared with 20%-70% detected by current application-generic techniques.     

Just-in-time dynamic voltage scaling: Exploiting inter-node slack to save energy in MPI programs

Although users of high-performance computing are most interested in raw performance, both energy and power consumption have become critical concerns. As a result, improving energy efficiency of nodes on HPC machines has become important, and the prevalence of power-scalable clusters, where the frequency and voltage can be dynamically modified, has increased.     

Specifying and enforcing application-level Web security policies

Application-level Web security refers to vulnerabilities inherent in the code of a Web-application itself (irrespective of the technologies in which it is implemented or the security of the Web-server/back-end database on which it is built). In the last few months, application-level vulnerabilities have been exploited with serious consequences: Hackers have tricked e-commerce sites into shipping goods for no charge, usernames and passwords have been harvested, and confidential information (such as addresses and credit-card numbers) has been leaked. We investigate new tools and techniques which address the problem of application-level Web security. We 1) describe a scalable structuring mechanism facilitating the abstraction of security policies from large Web-applications developed in heterogeneous multiplatform environments; 2) present a set of tools which assist programmers in developing secure applications which are resilient to a wide range of common attacks; and 3) report results and experience arising from our implementation of these techniques.     

In-memory,distributed content-based recommender system

Burdened by their popularity, recommender systems increasingly take on larger datasets while they are expected to deliver high quality results within reasonable time. To meet these ever growing requirements, industrial recommender systems often turn to parallel hardware and distributed computing. While the MapReduce paradigm is generally accepted for massive parallel data processing, it often entails complex algorithm reorganization and suboptimal efficiency because mid-computation values are typically read from and written to hard disk. This work implements an in-memory, content-based recommendation algorithm and shows how it can be parallelized and efficiently distributed across many homogeneous machines in a distributed-memory environment. By focusing on data parallelism and carefully constructing the definition of work in the context of recommender systems, we are able to partition the complete calculation process into any number of independent and equally sized jobs. An empirically validated performance model is developed to predict parallel speedup and promises high efficiencies for realistic hardware configurations. For the MovieLens 10 M dataset we note efficiency values up to 71 % for a configuration of 200 computing nodes (eight cores per node).