519875
Virtual Clusters for Grid Communities
A challenging issue facing Grid communities is that while Grids can provide access to many heterogeneous resources, the resources to which access is provided often do not match the needs of a specific application or service. In an environment in which both resource availability and software requirements evolve rapidly, this disconnect can lead to resource underutilization, user frustration, and much wasted effort spent on bridging the gap between applications and resources. We show here how these issues can be overcome by allowing authorized Grid clients to negotiate the creation of virtual clusters made up of virtual machines configured to suit client requirements for software environment and hardware allocation. We introduce descriptions and methods that allow us to deploy flexibly configured virtual cluster workspaces. We describe their configuration, implementation, and evaluate them in the context of a virtual cluster representing the environment in production use by the Open Science Grid. Our performance evaluation results show that virtual clusters representing current Grid production environments can be deployed and managed efficiently, and thus can provide an acceptable platform for Grid applications.
11479391
Virtual Workspaces in the Grid
Despite significant progress in the development of Grid infrastructure, the provisioning of a customized and controllable remote execution environment remains an open issue. This paper introduces the concept of a virtual workspace, a configurable execution environment that can be created and managed as a first-class entity to reflect client requirements. Such workspaces can be dynamically deployed on a variety of resources decoupling the notion of environment and resource. We show how virtual workspaces fit into the Grid architecture, present an example implementation using virtual machines, and discuss our initial experiences using this system in practice and with applications.
2953976
A performance study of monitoring and information services for distributed systems
Monitoring and information services form a key component of a distributed system, or Grid. A quantitative study of such services can aid in understanding the performance limitations, advise in the deployment of the monitoring system, and help evaluate future development work. To this end, we study the performance of three monitoring and information services for distributed systems: the Globus Toolkit/spl reg/ Monitoring and Discovery Service (MDS2), the European Data Grid Relational Grid Monitoring Architecture (R-GMA) and Hawkeye, part of the Condor project. We perform experiments to test their scalability with respect to number of users, number of resources and amount of data collected. Our study shows that each approach has different behaviors, often due to their different design goals. In the four sets of experiments we conducted to evaluate the performance of the service components under different circumstances, we found a strong advantage to caching or pre-fetching the data, as well as the need to have primary components at well-connected sites because of the high load seen by all systems.
8769201
Virtual workspaces: Achieving quality of service and quality of life in the Grid
By defining standardized protocols for discovering, accessing, monitoring, and managing remote computers, storage systems, networks, and other resources, Grid technologies make it possible—in principle—to allocate resources to applications dynamically, in an on-demand fashion [1]. However, while Grids offer users access to many diverse and powerful resources, they do little to ensure that once a resource is accessed, it fulfills user expectations for
13651032
Bipartite density of cubic graphs
We first obtain the exact value for bipartite density of a cubic line graph on n vertices. Then we give an upper bound for the bipartite density of cubic graphs in terms of the smallest eigenvalue of the adjacency matrix. In addition, we characterize, except in the case n = 20, those graphs for which the upper bound is obtained.
12946822
Partial parallel factorization in soft-decision Reed-Solomon decoding
Reed-Solomon (RS) codes have very broad applications in communications and data storage systems. The recently developed Koetter-Vardy (KV) soft-decision decoding algorithm of RS codes can achieve substantial coding gain, while has a complexity polynomial with respect to the codeword length. One of the major steps of the KV algorithm is the factorization step. A prediction-based architecture is developed in prior efforts to reduce the latency and silicon area of this step. However, the speedup can be achieved by this approach is limited by the serial nature of the factorization algorithm. The computations involved in multiple iteration levels can not be carried out simultaneously. In this work, a novel partial parallel architecture is proposed for the factorization step. The partial 2-parallel architecture can achieve a speedup of 19% over prior works.
5918703
Delving into internet streaming media delivery: a quality and resource utilization perspective
Modern Internet streaming services have utilized various techniques to improve the quality of streaming media delivery. Despite the characterization of media access patterns and user behaviors in many measurement studies, few studies have focused on the streaming techniques themselves, particularly on the quality of streaming experiences they offer end users and on the resources of the media systems that they consume. In order to gain insights into current streaming services techniques and thus provide guidance on designing resource-efficient and high quality streaming media systems, we have collected a large streaming media workload from thousands of broadband home users and business users hosted by a major ISP, and analyzed the most commonly used streaming techniques such as automatic protocol switch, Fast Streaming, MBR encoding and rate adaptation. Our measurement and analysis results show that with these techniques, current streaming systems these techniques tend to over-utilize CPU and bandwidth resources to provide better services to end users, which may not be a desirable and effective is not necessary the best way to improve the quality of streaming media delivery. Motivated by these results, we propose and evaluate a coordination mechanism that effectively takes advantage of both Fast Streaming and rate adaptation to better utilize the server and Internet resources for streaming quality improvement.
736327
A usage-based authorization framework for collaborative computing systems
Collaborative systems such as Grids provide efficient and scalable access to distributed computing capabilities and enable seamless resource sharing between users and platforms. This heterogeneous distribution of resources and the various modes of collaborations that exist between users, virtual organizations, and resource providers require scalable, flexible, and fine-grained access control to pro-tect both individual and shared computing resources. In this paper we propose a usage control (UCON) based authorization frame-work for collaborative applications. In our framework, usage con-trol policies are defined using subject and object attributes, along with system attributes as conditions. General attributes include not only persistent attributes such as role and group memberships, but also mutable usage attributes of subjects and objects. Conditions in UCON can be used to support context-based authorizations in ad-hoc collaborations. As a proof-of-concept we implement a pro-totype system based on our proposed architecture and conduct ex-perimental studies to demonstrate the feasibility and performance of our approach.
1561680
Design of full band IIR digital differentiators
This paper presents an efficient method for designing full band IIR digital differentiators in the complex Chebyshev sense. The proposed method is based on the formulation of a generalized eigenvalue problem by using the Remez multiple exchange algorithm. Therefore, a set of filter coefficients can be easily obtained by solving the eigenvalue problem to find the absolute minimum eigenvalue, and then the complex Chebyshev approximation is attained through a few iterations starting from a given initial guess. The proposed algorithm is computationally efficient because it not only retains the speed inherent in the Remez exchange algorithm, but also simplifies the interpolation step. One design example is presented and compared with the conventional methods. It can be seen that the design results obtained by using the proposed method are better than that in the conventional methods.