846192
Design and evaluation of a conit-based continuous consistency model for replicated services
The tradeoffs between consistency, performance, and availability are well understood. Traditionally, however, designers of replicated systems have been forced to choose from either strong consistency guarantees or none at all. This paper explores the semantic space between traditional strong and optimistic consistency models for replicated services. We argue that an important class of applications can tolerate relaxed consistency, but benefit from bounding the maximum rate of inconsistent access in an application-specific manner. Thus, we develop a conit-based continuous consistency model to capture the consistency spectrum using three application-independent metrics, numerical error, order error, and staleness. We then present the design and implementation of TACT, a middleware layer that enforces arbitrary consistency bounds among replicas using these metrics. We argue that the TACT consistency model can simultaneously achieve the often conflicting goals of generality and practicality by describing how a broad range of applications can express their consistency semantics using TACT and by demonstrating that application-independent algorithms can efficiently enforce target consistency levels. Finally, we show that three replicated applications running across the Internet demonstrate significant semantic and performance benefits from using our framework.
7547507
Efficient Numerical Error Bounding for Replicated Network Services
The goal of this work is to support replicated network services that accept updates to numerical records from multiple wide-area locations. Given the high overhead of maintaining strong consistency, many replicated services can tolerate divergence of their shared data, as long as the numerical error is bounded. Target distributed services include replicated stock quotes services, online auctions, distributed sensor systems, wide-area resource accounting and load balancing for replicated servers. We present two algorithms to e ciently bound absolute error using only local information. Split-Weight AE separately bounds increases and decreases, while Compound-Weight AE bounds them together. The two algorithms can be combined to provide good performance and low space overhead. Our Inductive RE algorithm transforms relative error to absolute error solely based on local knowledge, taking advantage of the fact that the divergence was properly bounded prior to each invocation of the algorithm. We also discuss two optimizations that reduce the space and computational overheads in the algorithms. This work is supported in part by the National Science Foundation (EIA-99772879). Vahdat is also supported by an NSF CAREER award (CCR-9984328). Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the VLDB copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Very Large Data Base Endowment. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and/or special permission from the Endowment. Proceedings of the 26th VLDB Conference, Cairo, Egypt, 2000.
5638908
Invalidation Clues for Database Scalability Services
For their scalability needs, data-intensive Web applications can use a database scalability service (DBSS), which caches applications' query results and answers queries on their behalf. One way for applications to address their security/privacy concerns when using a DBSS is to encrypt all data that passes through the DBSS. Doing so, however, causes the DBSS to invalidate large regions of its cache when data updates occur. To invalidate more precisely, the DBSS needs help in order to know which results to invalidate; such help inevitably reveals some properties about the data. In this paper, we present invalidation clues, a general technique that enables applications to reveal little data to the DBSS, yet limit the number of unnecessary invalidations. Compared with previous approaches, invalidation clues provide applications significantly improved tradeoffs between security/privacy and scalability. Our experiments using three Web application benchmarks, on a prototype DBSS we have built, confirm that invalidation clues are indeed a low-overhead, effective, and general technique for applications to balance their privacy and scalability needs.
26402360
Signed quorum systems
With n servers that independently fail with probability of p < 0.5, it is well known that the majority quorum system achieves the best availability among all quorum systems. However, even this optimal construction requires (n+1)/2 functioning servers out of n. Furthermore, the number of probes needed to acquire a quorum is also lower bounded by (n+1)/2.Motivated by the need for a highly available and low probe complexity quorum system in the Internet, this paper proposes signed quorum systems (SQS) that can be available as long as any O(1) servers are available, and simultaneously have O(1) probe complexity. SQS provides probabilistic intersection guarantees and exploits the property of independent mismatches in today’s Internet. Such key property has been validated previously under multiple Internet measurement traces. This paper then extensively studies the availability, probe complexity, and load of SQS, derives lower bounds for all three metrics, and constructs matching upper bounds. We show that in addition to the qualitatively superior availability and probe complexity, SQS also decouples availability from load and probe complexity, so that optimal availability can be achieved under most probe complexity and load values.
7603120
Defragmenting DHT-based Distributed File Systems
Existing DHT-based file systems use consistent hashing to assign file blocks to random machines. As a result, a user task accessing an entire file or multiple files needs to retrieve blocks from many different machines. This paper demonstrates that significant availability and performance gains can be achieved if instead, users are able to retrieve all the data needed for a given task from only a few DHT nodes. We explore the design and implications of such a "defragmented" DHT-based distributed file system, called D2, that also maintains important DHT properties like storage load balance. We show using real-world file system traces that a simple key encoding scheme is sufficient to maintain good defragmentation for most user tasks. Using both simulation and an actual 1,000 node deployment, we show that D2 increases availability by over an order of magnitude and improves user-perceived latency by 30- 100% compared to a traditional design.
14427569
Design and evaluation of a continuous consistency model for replicated services
The tradeoffs between consistency, performance, and availability are well understood. Traditionally, however, designers of replicated systems have been forced to choose from either strong consistency guarantees or none at all. This paper explores the semantic space between traditional strong and optimistic consistency models for replicated services. We argue that an important class of applications can tolerate relaxed consistency, but benefit from bounding the maximum rate of inconsistent access in an application-specific manner. Thus, we develop a set of metrics, Numerical Error, Order Error, and Staleness, to capture the consistency spectrum. We then present the design and implementation of TACT, a middleware layer that enforces arbitrary consistency bounds among replicas using these metrics. Finally, we show that three replicated applications demonstrate significant semantic and performance benefits from using our framework.
28648006
Molecular dynamics simulations of liquid methanol and methanol-water mixtures with polarizable models
A polarizable model for simulation of liquid methanol, compatible with the COS/G2 water model, has been developed using the Charge-on-Spring (COS) technique. The model consists of three point charges, with one polarizable center on the oxygen atom. The Lennard-Jones parameters on the oxygen atom together with the molecular polarizability were varied to reproduce the experimental heat of vaporization and density of liquid methanol at ambient conditions. We examined the energies of various methanol dimers in the gas phase and compared them with values obtained from ab initio calculations. The model was then used to study the thermodynamic, dynamic, structural, and dielectric properties of liquid methanol as well as of a methanol-water mixture. A microscopic picture of the structure of pure liquid methanol and of the methanol-water mixture is provided. Good agreement was found between the results from our model simulations and available experimental and ab initio calculation data. In particular, the experimental dielectric permittivity of 32 could be reproduced, which had been shown to be difficult when using nonpolarizable models.
120152362
Graph matching using spectral embedding and alignment
This paper describes how graph-spectral methods can be used to transform the node correspondence problem into one of point-set alignment. We commence by using the ISOMAP algorithm to embed the nodes of a graph in a low-dimensional Euclidean space. With the nodes in the graph transformed to points in a metric space, we can recast the problem of graph matching into that of aligning the points. Here, we use a variant of the Scott and Longuet-Higgins algorithm to find point correspondences. We experiment with the resulting algorithm on a number of real-world problems.
16750086
Supporting transactional cache consistency in mobile database systems
In a mobile computing environment, caching of frequently accessed data has been shown to be a useful technique for reducing contention on the narrow bandwidth of the wireless channels. However, the traditional client/server strategies for supporting transactional cache consistency that require extensive communications between a client and a server are not appropriate in a mobile computing environment. In this paper, we propose a new protocol, called OCC-UTS (Optimisitic Concurrency Control with Update TimeStamp), to support transactional cache consistency in a wireless mobile computing environment by utilizing the broadcast-based solutions for the problem of invalidating caches. The consistency check on accessed data and the commitment protocol are implemented in a truly distributed fashion as an integral part of cache invalidation process, with most burden of consistency check being downloaded to mobile clients. Also, our esperiments based on an analytical model substantiate the basic idea and study the performance characteristics. Experimental results show that OCC-UTS protocol without local cache outperforms other competitor protocol, and the more frequent a mobile client accesses data items the more efficient OCC-UTS protocol with local cache is. With respect to disconnection, a mobile client aborts its transaction if it disconnects more than the invalidation broadcast window size. Thus, the tolerance to disconnection is improved if the invalidation broadcast window size is extended.
10203274
Adaptation of Length in a Nonstationary Environment
In this paper, we examine the behavior of a variable length GA in a nonstationary problem environment. Results indicate that a variable length GA is better able to adapt to changes than a fixed length GA. Closer examination of the evolutionary dynamics reveals that a variable length GA can in fact take advantage of its variable length representation to exploit good quality building blocks after a change in the problem environment.
22691758
A neural network for 500 word vocabulary word spotting using non-uniform units
We introduce acoustic sub-word units to neural networks for speaker-independent continuous speech recognition. The functions of segmenting input and detecting words are implemented with networks of simple structures. The non-uniform unit which we introduce in this research can model phoneme variations caused by co-articulation spread over several phonemes and between words. These units can be segmented by the network according to stationary and transition parts of speech without iteration or without considering all possible position shifts. A word lexicon can be trained by the network, which can effectively memorize all transcription variations in the training utterances of words. The results of speaker-independent word spotting of 520 words with TIMIT data are described.