5382814
Network-Embedded Programmable Storage and Its Applications
We consider the utility of two key properties of network-embedded storage: programmability and network-awareness. We describe two extensive applications, whose performance and functionalities are significantly enhanced through innovative combination of the two properties. One is an incremental file-transfer system tailor-made for low-bandwidth conditions. The other is a “customizable” distributed file system that can assume very different personalities in different topological and workload environments. The applications show how both properties are necessary to exploit the full potential of network-embedded storage. We also discuss the requirements of a general infrastructure to support easy and effective access to network-embedded storage, and describe a prototype implementation of such an infrastructure.
208003557
Serverless network file systems
We propose a new paradigm for network file system design: serverless network file systems. While traditional network file systems rely on a central server machine, a serverless system utilizes workstations cooperating as peers to provide all file system services. Any machine in the system can store, cache, or control any block of data. Our approach uses this location independence, in combination with fast local area networks, to provide better performance and scalability than traditional file systems. Furthermore, because any machine in the system can assume the responsibilities of a failed component, our serverless design also provides high availability via redundatn data storage. To demonstrate our approach, we have implemented a prototype serverless network file system called xFS. Preliminary performance measurements suggest that our architecture achieves its goal of scalability. For instance, in a 32-node xFS system with 32 active clients, each client receives nearly as much read or write throughput as it would see if it were the only active client.
5165465
Adaptive control for packet video
Describes a portable and robust software mechanism for adaptive frame rate control for real time packet video transfer and viewing in workstation environments. No special hardware or system support is assumed. It includes (1) a responsive feedback system for dynamic presentation layer rate control in response to network load, (2) a simple and effective transport layer flow control scheme built upon an unreliable network protocol, and (3) data structures and scheduling support for integrating the rate and flow control mechanisms. The authors demonstrate that excellent jitter control is achieved by gracefully trading image resolution, and loss rates can be drastically reduced by appropriate flow control.<<ETX>>
11858758
Improving the performance of log-structured file systems with adaptive methods
File system designers today face a dilemma. A log-structured file system (LFS) can offer superior performance for many common workloads such as those with frequent small writes, read traffic that is predominantly absorbed by the cache, and sufficient idle time to clean the log. However, an LFS has poor performance for other workloads, such as random updates to a full disk with little idle time to clean. In this paper, we show how adaptive algorithms can be used to enable LFS to provide high performance across a wider range of workloads. First, we show how to improve LFS write performance in three ways: by choosing the segment size to match disk and workload characteristics, by modifying the LFS cleaning policy to adapt to changes in disk utilization, and by using cached data to lower cleaning costs. Second, we show how to improve LFS read performance by reorganizing data to match read patterns. Using trace-driven simulations on a combination of synthetic and measured workloads, we demonstrate that these extensions to LFS can significantly improve its performance.
14669009
Considering the energy consumption of mobile storage alternatives
This paper is motivated by a simple question: what are the energy consumption characteristics of mobile storage alternatives? To answer this question, we are faced with a design space of multiple dimensions. Two important dimensions are the type of storage technologies and the type of file systems. In this paper, we explore some options along each of these two dimensions. We have constructed a logical-disk system, which can be configured to run on different storage technologies and to emulate the behavior of different file systems. As we explore these configuration options, we find that the energy behavior is determined by a complex interaction of three factors: the power management mechanism of the storage device, the distribution of idleness in the workload, and the file system strategies that attempt to exploit and bridge these first two factors.
6622555
A quantitative analysis of cache policies for scalable network file systems
Current network file system protocols rely heavily on a central server to coordinate file activity among client workstations. This central server can become a bottleneck that limits scalability for environments with large numbers of clients. In central server systems such as NFS and AFS, all client writes, cache misses, and coherence messages are handled by the server. To keep up with this workload, expensive server machines are needed, configured with high-performance CPUs, memory systems, and I/O channels. Since the server stores all data, it must be physically capable of connecting to many disks. This reliance on a central server also makes current systems inappropriate for wide area network use where the network bandwidth to the server may be limited.
In this paper, we investigate the quantitative performance effect of moving as many of the server responsibilities as possible to client workstations to reduce the need for high-performance server machines. We have devised a cache protocol in which all data reside on clients and all data transfers proceed directly from client to client. The server is used only to coordinate these data transfers. This protocol is being incorporated as part of our experimental file system, xFS. We present results from a trace-driven simulation study of the protocol using traces from a 237 client NFS installation. We find that the xFS protocol reduces server load by more than a factor of six compared to AFS without significantly affecting response time or file availability.
7961359
LexTrim: A Lexical Cohesion Based Approach to Parse-and-Trim Style Headline Generation
In this paper we compare two parse-and-trim style headline generation systems. The Topiary system uses a statistical learning approach to finding topic labels for headlines, while our approach, the LexTrim system, identifies key summary words by analysing the lexical cohesion structure of a text. The performance of these systems is evaluated using the ROUGE evaluation suite on the DUC 2004 news stories collection.
40944529
Symmetric Graphs of Order a Product of Two Distinct Primes
A simple undirected graph ? is said to be symmetric if its automorphism group Aut ? is transitive on the set of ordered pairs of adjacent vertices of ?, and ? is said to be imprimitive if Aut ? acts imprimitively on the vertices of ?. Let k and p be distinct primes with k < p. This paper gives a classification of all imprimitive symmetric graphs on kp vertices for k ? 5. The cases k < 5 have been treated previously by Cheng and Oxley (k = 2) and the second and third authors (k = 3), and the classification of primitive symmetric graphs on kp vertices with k ? 5 was done by the first and third authors.
1250825
Enhancing Training Set for Face Detection
We present a novel method to enhance training set for face detection with nonlinearly generated examples from the original data. The motivation is from support vector machines (SVM) that, for classification problems, examples lying close to class boundary usually have more influence and thus are more informative than those far from the boundary. We utilize a nonlinear technique - reduced set (RS) method and a new image distance metric to generate new examples, and then add them to the original collected database to enhance it. Extensive experiments show that the proposed approach has an encouraging performance
5002092
How to Train a Classifier Based on the Huge Face Database?
The development of web and digital camera nowadays has made it easier to collect more than hundreds of thousands of examples. How to train a face detector based on the collected enormous face database? This paper presents a manifold-based method to subsample. That is, we learn the manifold from the collected face database and then subsample training set by the estimated geodesic distance which is calculated during the manifold learning. Using the subsampled training set based on the manifold, we train an AdaBoost-based face detector. The trained detector is tested on the MIT+CMU frontal face test set. The experimental results show that the proposed method is effective and efficient to train a classifier confronted with the huge database.
18780724
Synchronizing a multicellular system by external input: an artificial control strategy
MOTIVATION
Although there are significant advances on elucidating the collective behaviors on biological organisms in recent years, the essential mechanisms by which the collective rhythms arise remain to be fully understood, and further how to synchronize multicellular networks by artificial control strategy has not yet been well explored.


RESULTS
A control strategy is developed to synchronize gene regulatory networks in a multicellular system when spontaneous synchronization cannot be achieved. We first construct an impulsive control system to model the process of periodically injecting coupling substances with constant or random impulsive control amounts into the common extracellular medium, and further study its effects on the dynamics of individual cells. We derive the threshold of synchronization induced by the periodic substance input. Therefore, we can synchronize the multicellular network to a specific collective behavior by changing the frequency and amplitude of the periodic stimuli. Moreover, a two-stage scheme is proposed to facilitate the synchronization in this paper. We show that the presence of the external input may also initiate different dynamics. The multicellular network of coupled repressilators is used to show the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results not only provide a perspective to understand the interactions between external stimuli and intrinsic physiological rhythms, but also may lead to development of realistic artificial control strategy and medical therapy.


AVAILABILITY



CONTACT
aihara@sat.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp.