16316127
MPI Farm Programs on Non-dedicated Clusters
MPI has been extremely successful. In areas like e.g. particle physics most of the available parallel programs are based on MPI. Unfortunately, they must be run in dedicated clusters or parallel machines, being unable to use for long running applications the growing pool of idle time of general-purpose desktop computers. Additionally, MPI offers a quite low level interface, which is hard to use for most scientist programmers. In the research described in this paper, we tried to see how far we could go to solve those two problems, keeping the portability of MPI programs, but drawing upon one restriction – only programs following the FARM paradigm were to be supported. The developed library – MpiFL – did provide us significant insight. It is now being successfully used at the physics department of the University of Coimbra, despite some shortcomings.
11507520
Web-based Metacomputing with JET
22782109
A Fault-Tolerant Mechanism for Simple Controllers
There are many industrial controllers where no systematic fault-tolerant mechanisms are included because of cost constraints. This paper addresses that problem by making a proposal for a simple and low-cost fault-tolerant technique, yet very effective, that can be used even in the simplest controllers. The mechanism is able of tolerating both hardware and software faults. It uses behaviour-based error detection, with checkpointing and rollback, to give resiliency to the application. The programs are made of possibly non-deterministic processes that communicate solely by messages. The technique, called RP-Actions, also guarantees that the recovery is domino-effect free. Software bugs are caught by acceptance tests as in recovery blocks. Forward error recovery is used for time, since time cannot be rolled back. Several implementations of the proposed mechanisms were made — we present in this paper some important results.
11033391
System-level versus user-defined checkpointing
Checkpointing and rollback recovery is a very effective technique to tolerate transient faults and preventive shutdowns. In the past, most of the checkpointing schemes published in the literature were supposed to be transparent to the application programmer and implemented at the operating-system level. In recent years, there has been some work on higher-level forms of checkpointing. In this second approach, the user is responsible for the checkpoint placement and is required to specify the checkpoint contents. We compare the two approaches: system-level and user-defined checkpointing. We discuss the pros and cons of both approaches and we present an experimental study that was conducted on a commercial parallel machine.
42069370
An Experimental Evaluation of Coordinated Checkpointing in a Parallel Machine
Coordinated checkpointing represents a very effective solution to assure the continuity of distributed and parallel applications in the occurrence of failures. In previous studies it has been proved that this approach achieved better results than independent checkpointing and message logging. However, we need to know more about the real overhead of coordinated checkpointing and get sustained insights about the best way to implement this technique of fault-tolerance. This paper presents an experimental evaluation of coordinated checkpointing in a parallel machine. It describes some optimization techniques and presents some performance results.
15654186
The Architecture and Performance of WMPI II
WMPI II is the only commercial implementation of MPI 2.0 that runs on both Windows and Linux clusters. It evolved from the first ever Windows version of MPI, then a port of MPICH, but is now fully built from its own code base. It supports both 32 and 64 bit versions and mixed clusters of Windows and Linux nodes. This paper describes the main design decisions and the multithreaded, non-polling architecture of WMPI II. Experimental results show that, although WMPI II has figures comparable to MPICH and LAM for latency and bandwidth, most application benchmarks perform significantly better when running on top of WMPI II.
206855912
An algorithm to compare OO-conceptual schemas
In this paper, an algorithmic study of how to compare object-oriented conceptual schemas in a data migration context is carried out. An algorithm is presented based on the tree-comparison technique that compares conceptual schemas. The algorithm uses semantic information in order to optimize efficiency. A template of the equivalences and differences between two schemas is generated in an automatic way. The template shows the results in terms of insertions, updates and deletions. This work is the first phase in a tool which performs the automatic migration of databases starting from the differences detected.
37459114
Cluster Analysis of Named Entities
This paper presents a statistics-based and language independent unsupervised approach for clustering possible named entities. We describe and motivate the features and statistical filters used by our clustering process. Using the Model-Based Clustering Analysis software we obtained different clusters of named entities. The method was applied to Bulgarian and English. For some clusters, precision is close to 100%; this helps human validation and saves time. Other clusters still need further refinement.
15739638
Identification of Document Language is Not yet a Completely Solved Problem
Existing Language Identification (LID) approaches do reach 100% precision, in most common situations, when dealing with documents written in just one language, and when those documents are large enough. However, LID approaches do not provide a reliable solution for some situations: when there is need to discriminate the correct variant of the language used in a text, for example, European or Brazilian variants of Portuguese, UK or USA English variants, or any other language variants. Another hard context occur with small touristic advertisements on the web, addressing foreigners but using local language to name most local entities. In this paper, we present a fully statistics- based LID approach which learns the most discriminant information according to each context, and identifies the correct language or language variant a text is written in. This methodology is shown to be correct for normal texts and maintains its robustness in hard LID contexts.
33382273
Implementation of mixed current/voltage testing using the IEEE P1149.4 infrastructure
The development of a mixed-signal test bus infrastructure-IEEE P1149.4-is now in the final stages of the standardization process. Evaluating the test capabilities enabled by this infrastructure is an important step needed to support it as a well established standard. This paper presents experiments carried out with a test chip provided by the P1149.4 working group, which explore the architecture of the proposed analog boundary module to implement alternative testing methods. These include a method for parametric testing of passive components based on the monitoring of the power supply current, and a mixed current/voltage technique allowing the implementation of correlation for testing analog and mixed-signal macros.
10139861
Dynamic slicing based on redex trails
Tracing computations is a widely used methodology for program debugging. Lazy languages, in particular, pose new demands on tracing techniques since following the actual trace of a computation is generally useless. Typically, they rely on the construction of a redex trail, a graph that describes the reductions of a computation and its relationships. While tracing provides a significant help for locating bugs, the task still remains complex. A well-known debugging technique for imperative programs is based on dynamic slicing, a method to find the program statements that influence the computation of a value for a specific program input.In this work, we introduce a novel technique for dynamic slicing in lazy functional logic languages. Rather than starting from scratch, our technique relies on (a slight extension of) redex trails. We provide a method to compute a correct and minimal dynamic slice from the redex trail of a computation. A clear advantage of our proposal is that one can enhance existing tracers with slicing capabilities with a modest implementation effort, since the same data structure (the redex trail) can be used for both tracing and slicing.