14383441
I-MINDS: An Agent-Oriented Information System for Applications in Education
In this paper, we describe an Intelligent Multiagent Infrastructure for Distributed Systems in Education (or I-MINDS) framework that applies an agent-oriented information system for education purposes. Our design employs distributed computing principles (i.e., Java Object Passing Interface and the Distributed Shared Object model) to facilitate cooperation among agents, data gathering and information dissemination, making the infrastructure portable, expandable and secure. Our motivations are to help teachers teach better and students learn better. A teacher, with the help of a teacher agent, is able to address important questions and survey the profile of each student (that is automatically maintained by the teacher agent). A student, with the help of a student agent, is able to collaborate with other students without having to form a buddies group him or herself. Thus, with the agents and a collaborative multiagent system, the I-MINDS framework is able to manage, process and share information intelligently.
9864742
JOPI: a Java object-passing interface
Recently there has been an increasing interest in developing parallel programming capabilities in Java to harness the vast resources available in clusters, grids and heterogeneous networked systems. In this paper, we introduce a Java object-passing interface (JOPI) library. JOPI provides Java programmers with the necessary functionality to write object-passing parallel programs in distributed heterogeneous systems. JOPI provides an MPI-like interface that can be used to exchange objects among processes. In addition to the well-known benefits of the object-oriented development model, using objects to exchange information in JOPI is advantageous because it facilitates passing complex structures and enables the programmer to isolate the problem space from the parallelization problem. The run-time environment for JOPI is portable, efficient and provides the necessary functionality to deploy and execute parallel Java programs. Experiments were conducted on a cluster system and a collection of heterogeneous platforms to measure JOPI's performance and compare it with MPI. The results show good performance gains using JOPI.
1546029
Design and Analysis of Hierarchical Ring Networks for Shared-Memory Multiprocessors
ÐWe study four augmentations of ring networks which are intended to enhance a ring's efficiency as a communication medium significantly, while increasing its structural complexity only modestly. Chordal rings add ashortcuto edges, which can be viewed as chords, to the ring. Express rings are chordal rings whose chords are routed outside the ring. Multirings append subsidiary rings to edges of a ring and, recursively, to edges of appended subrings. Hierarchical ring networks (HRN's) append subsidiary rings to nodes of a ring and, recursively, to nodes of appended subrings. We show that these four modes of augmentation are very closely related: 1) Planar chordal rings, planar express rings, and multirings are topologically equivalent families of networks with the acutwidtho of an express ring translating into the atree deptho of its isomorphic multiring and vice versa. 2) Every depth-d HRN is a spanning subgraph of a depth-2dÿ 1 multiring. 3) Every depth-d multiring M can be embedded into a d-dimensional mesh with dilation 3 in such a way that some node of M resides at a corner of the mesh. 4) Every depth-d HRN H can be embedded into a d-dimensional mesh with dilation 2 in such a way that some node of H resides at a corner of the mesh. In addition to demonstrating that these four augmented ring networks are grid graphs, our embedding results afford us close bounds on how much decrease in diameter is achievable for a given increase in structural complexity for the networks. Specifically, we derive upper and lower bounds on the optimal diameters of N-node depth-d multirings and HRNs that are asymptotically tight for large N and d. Index TermsÐRing networks, chordal rings, express rings, multirings, hierarchical ring networks, grid graphs, graph embedding, diameter trade-offs.
8918525
An efficient, low-cost inconsistency detection framework for data and service sharing in an Internet-scale system
In this paper, we argue that a broad range of Internet-scale distributed applications can benefit from an underlying low-cost consistency detection framework that is an alternative to inconsistency avoidance and can detect inconsistency among nodes sharing data or services in a timely manner. This paper first presents an overview of the inconsistency detection framework. Then, it discusses the detailed design of the two-layer inconsistency detection module, the core component of this framework, which can detect inconsistency among nodes in a timely manner. The proposed two-layer inconsistency detection module is evaluated both analytically and via simulations, which shows that this module can significantly reduce the time to detect inconsistency among nodes without adding much maintenance cost. Finally, this paper outlines the possible mechanisms to discern the application semantics and to resolve the detected inconsistencies
16880603
Adaptive Load Balancing for Long-Range MD Simulations in A Distributed Environment
Molecular dynamics, a computationally intensive application is used by researchers in various fields. The inherent parallelism (Plimpton and Hendrickson, 1994) in the computations involved with this application can be exploited in parallel and distributed environments. However, in distributed environments such as the grid (Foster et al., 2001), the available resources, namely the network and computational power, are continually changing with respect to every available node. To optimally utilize these dynamic resources, a scheduler should be able to continually adapt to the changes and suitably vary the load scheduled to every available node. We propose one such scheduling algorithm. The proposed scheduling algorithm builds and continually updates a model of the distributed system, which it then uses to make decisions about how to optimally redistribute the load in the system at every time step of the MD simulation. The scheduling algorithm can additionally handle dynamic changes in the number of nodes available for computation at runtime. We then demonstrate the efficiency of our scheduling algorithm when applied to MD simulations in a distributed environment
26735928
I/O Response Time in a Fault-Tolerant Parallel Virtual File System
A fault tolerant parallel virtual file system is designed and implemented to provide high I/O performance and high reliability. A queuing model is used to analyze in detail the average response time when multiple clients access the system. The results show that I/O response time is with a function of several operational parameters. It decreases with the increase in I/O buffer hit rate for read requests, write buffer size for write requests and number of server nodes in the parallel file system, while higher I/O requests arrival rate increases I/O response time.
16906364
Scalable and Robust Aggregation Techniques for Extracting Statistical Information in Sensor Networks
Wireless sensor networks have stringent constraints on system resources and data aggregation techniques are critically important. However, accurate data aggregation is difficult due to the variation of sensor readings and due to the frequent communication failures. To address these difficulties, we propose a scalable and robust data aggregation algorithm. The novelty of our work includes two aspects. First, our algorithm exploits the mixture model and the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm for parameter estimation. Hence, it captures the effects of aggregation over different scales while keeping the communication cost low. Second, our algorithm exploits loss-tolerant multi-path routing schemes. Hence, it obtains accurate statistical information even in the presence of high link and node failure rates. We demonstrate that our techniques reduce communication cost while retaining the precious statistical information otherwise neglected by other aggregation techniques. Our evaluation shows the proposed techniques are robust against link and node failures, and perform consistently well.
9730668
Broadening the Semantic Coverage of Agent Communicative Acts
Communicative acts-based ACLs specify domain-independent information about communication and relegate domain-dependent information to an unspecified content language. This is reasonable, but the ACLs cover only a small fraction of the domain-independent information possible. As a key element of modern ACLs, the set of communicative acts needs to be as complete as possible to allow agents to communicate the widest range of information with agreed-upon semantics. This paper describes a new approach to broaden the semantic coverage of agent communicative acts. It provides agents with the ability to express more of the semantics of human languages and yields a more powerful ACL. We first describe the main meaning categories and semantics for an ACL, which we derive from prior work on speech-act classifications. Next, we prove the resultant semantic coverage. Finally, we present some example applications, which demonstrate that the approach can combine the benefits of the FIPA ACL with Ballmer and Brennenstuhl’s speech act classification, resulting in a more expressive and efficient ACL.
16310485
Stably Computable Properties of Network Graphs
We consider a scenario in which anonymous, finite-state sensing devices are deployed in an ad-hoc communication network of arbitrary size and unknown topology, and explore what properties of the network graph can be stably computed by the devices. We show that they can detect whether the network has degree bounded by a constant d, and, if so, organize a computation that achieves asymptotically optimal linear memory use. We define a model of stabilizing inputs to such devices and show that a large class of predicates of the multiset of final input values are stably computable in any weakly-connected network. We also show that nondeterminism in the transition function does not increase the class of stably computable predicates.
206799544
A continuation method for (strongly) monotone variational inequalities
We consider the variational inequality problem, denoted by VIP(X, F), whereF is a strongly monotone function and the convex setX is described by some inequality (and possibly equality) constraints. This problem is solved by a continuation (or interior-point) method, which solves a sequence of certain perturbed variational inequality problems. These perturbed problems depend on a parameterμ > 0. It is shown that the perturbed problems have a unique solution for all values ofμ > 0, and that any sequence generated by the continuation method converges to the unique solution of VIP(X,F) under a well-known linear independence constraint qualification (LICQ). We also discuss the extension of the continuation method to monotone variational inequalities and present some numerical results obtained with a suitable implementation of this method. © 1998 The Mathematical Programming Society, Inc. Published by Elsevier Science B.V.
18051966
Design and analysis of adaptive strategies for locating internet-based servers in MANETs
A critical problem in providing Internet access to Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) is how the mobile hosts can locate Internet-based servers efficiently in a dynamic, unstructured network. This paper studies adaptive strategies that combine both proactive advertising by the servers and on-demand discovery by the mobile hosts. The adaptive strategies determine the relative rate of proactive advertising and on-demand discovery according to system characteristics such as host mobility level and offered load. Our simulation study reveals that, compared to the previous proactive strategies and reactive strategies, the adaptive strategies reduce network traffic by several times when the network has a moderate offered load and a low or high level of host mobility.