47427184
The Performance Impact of Kernel Prefetching on Buffer Cache Replacement Algorithms
A fundamental challenge in improving file system performance is to design effective block replacement algorithms to minimize buffer cache misses. Despite the well-known interactions between prefetching and caching, almost all buffer cache replacement algorithms have been proposed and studied comparatively, without taking into account file system prefetching, which exists in all modern operating systems. This paper shows that such kernel prefetching can have a significant impact on the relative performance in terms of the number of actual disk l/Os of many well-known replacement algorithms; it can not only narrow the performance gap but also change the relative performance benefits of different algorithms. Moreover, since prefetching can increase the number of blocks clustered for each disk I/O and, hence, the time to complete the I/O, the reduction in the number of disk l/Os may not translate into proportional reduction in the total I/O time. These results demonstrate the importance of buffer caching research taking file system prefetching into consideration and comparing the actual disk l/Os and the execution time under different replacement algorithms.
15953152
Understanding network delay changes caused by routing events
Network delays and delay variations are two of the most important network performance metrics directly impacting real-time applications such as voice over IP and time-critical financial transactions. This importance is illustrated by past work on understanding the delay constancy of Internet paths and recent work on predicting network delays using virtual coordinate systems. Merely understanding currently observed delays is insufficient, as network performance can degrade not only due to traffic variability but also as a result of routing changes. Unfortunately this latter effect so far has been ignored in understanding and predicting delay related performance metrics of Internet paths. Our work is the first to address this short coming by systematically analyzing changes in network delays and jitter of a diverse and comprehensive set of Internet paths. Using empirical measurements, we illustrate that routing changes can result in roundtrip delay increase of converged paths by more than 1 second. Surprisingly, intradomain routing changes can also cause such large delay increase.
 Given these observations, we develop a framework to analyze in detail the impact of routing changes on network delays between end-hosts. Using topology information and properties associated with routing changes, we explain the causes for observed delay fluctuations and more importantly identify routing changes that lead to predictable effects on delay-related metrics. Using our framework, we study the predictability of delay and jitter changes in response to both passively observed interdomain and actively measured intradomain routing changes.
6730998
Monitoring remotely executing shared memory programs in software DSMs
Peer-to-peer (P2P) cycle sharing over the Internet has become increasingly popular as a way to share idle cycles. A fundamental problem faced by P2P cycle sharing systems is how to incrementally monitor and verify, with low overhead, the execution of jobs submitted to a remote untrusted hosting machine, or cluster of machines. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of GripCop DSM, a novel incremental execution monitoring and verification scheme for software distributed shared memory (SDSM) programs running on remote clusters. Our scheme maximally leverages the shared memory abstraction provided by the SDSM system by extending the shared memory abstraction to the monitoring process by replicating one of the processes running on the host cluster to verify intermediate results at runtime. Our GripCop DSM employs two monitoring schemes: (i) a full-scale monitoring scheme that completely replicates the computation of a process running on the cluster; and (ii) a decoy monitoring scheme that deceives the host cluster into believing that full-scale monitoring is being performed without it ever actually being done, thereby incurring negligible overhead. Experiments show that the combined use of full-scale and decoy monitoring ensures faithful execution with low performance impact, even over a wide area network
481550
Improving Fine-Grained Irregular Shared-Memory Benchmarks by Data Reordering
We demonstrate that data reordering can substantially improve the performance of fine-grained irregular shared-memory benchmarks, on both hardware and software shared-memory systems. In particular, we evaluate two distinct data reordering techniques that seek to co-locate in memory objects that are in close proximity in the physical system modeled by the computation. The effects of these techniques are increased spatial locality and reduced false sharing. We evaluate the effectiveness of the data reordering techniques on a set of five irregular applications from SPLASH-2 and Chaos. We implement both techniques in a small library, allowing us to enable them in an application by adding less than 10 lines of code. Our results on one hardware and two software shared-memory systems show that, with data reordering during initialization, the performance of these applications is improved by 12%-99% on the Origin 2000, 30%-366% on TreadMarks, and 14%-269% on HLRC.
43789567
A Self-Organizing Flock of Condors
1998178
A Hierarchical Approach to Internet Distance Prediction
Internet distance prediction gives pair-wise latency information with limited measurements. Recent studies have revealed that the quality of existing prediction mechanisms from the application perspective is short of satisfactory. In this paper, we explore the root causes and remedies for this problem. Our experience with different landmark selection schemes shows that although selecting nearby landmarks can increase the prediction accuracy for short distances, it can cause the prediction accuracy for longer distances to degrade. Such uneven prediction quality significantly impacts application performance. Instead of trying to select the landmark nodes in some "intelligent" fashion, we propose a hierarchical prediction approach with straightforward landmark selection. Hierarchical prediction utilizes multiple coordinate sets at multiple distance scales, with the "right" scale being chosen for prediction each time. Experiments with Internet measurement datasets show that this hierarchical approach is extremely promising for increasing the accuracy of network distance prediction.
14006876
Perfect spline approximation
Our study of perfect spline approximation reveals: (i) it is closely related to ΣΔ modulation used in one-bit quantization of bandlimited signals. In fact, they share the same recursive formulae, although in different contexts; (ii) the best rate of approximation by perfect splines of order r with equidistant knots of mesh size h is hr-1. This rate is optimal in the sense that a function can be approximated with a better rate if and only if it is a polynomial of degree < r.The uniqueness of best approximation is studied, too. Along the way, we also give a result on an extremal problem, that is, among all perfect splines with integer knots on R, (multiples of) Euler splines have the smallest possible norms.
10673582
Automatic 3D reconstruction for face recognition
An analysis-by-synthesis framework for face recognition with variant pose, illumination and expression (PIE) is proposed in this paper. First, an efficient 2D-to-3D integrated face reconstruction approach is introduced to reconstruct a personalized 3D face model from a single frontal face image with neutral expression and normal illumination. Then, realistic virtual faces with different PIE are synthesized based on the personalized 3D face to characterize the face subspace. Finally, face recognition is conducted based on these representative virtual faces. Compared with other related works, this framework has the following advantages: 1) only one single frontal face is required for face recognition, which avoids the burdensome enrollment work; 2) the synthesized face samples provide the capability to conduct recognition under difficult conditions like complex PIE; and 3) the proposed 2D-to-3D integrated face reconstruction approach is fully automatic and more efficient. The extensive experimental results show that the synthesized virtual faces significantly improve the accuracy of face recognition with variant PIE.
22875771
ACO-Steiner: Ant Colony Optimization Based Rectilinear Steiner Minimal Tree Algorithm
The rectilinear Steiner minimal tree (RSMT) problem is one of the fundamental problems in physical design, especially in routing, which is known to be NP-complete. This paper presents an algorithm, called ACO-Steiner, for RSMT construction based on ant colony optimization (ACO). An RSMT is constructed with ants' movements in Hanan grid, and then the constraint of Hanan grid is broken to accelerate ants' movements to improve the performance of the algorithm. This algorithm has been implemented on a Sun workstation with Unix operating system and the results have been compared with the fastest exact RSMT algorithm, GeoSteiner 3.1 and a recent heuristic using batched greedy triple construction (BGTC). Experimental results show that ACO-Steiner can get a short running time and keep the high performance. Furthermore, it is also found that the ACO-Steiner can be easily extended to be used to some other problems, such as rectilinear Steiner minimal tree avoiding obstacles, and congestion reduction in global routing.
28386762
Taxonomy Building and Machine Learning Based Automatic Classification for Knowledge-Oriented Chinese Questions
In this paper, we propose a taxonomy for knowledge-oriented question, and study the machine learning based classification for knowledge-oriented Chinese questions. By knowledge-oriented questions, we mean questions carrying information or knowledge about something, which cannot be well described by previous taxonomies. We build the taxonomy after the study of previous work and analysis of 6776 Chinese knowledge-oriented questions collected from different realistic sources. Then we investigate the new task of knowledge-oriented Chinese questions classification based on this taxonomy. In our approach, the popular SVM learning method is employed as classification algorithm. We explore different features and their combinations and different kernel functions for the classification, and use different performance metrics for evaluation. The results demonstrate that the proposed approach is desirable and robust. Thorough error analysis is also conduced.
30629384
Ordering Unsymmetric Matrices into Bordered Block Diagonal Form for Parallel Processing
Large, sparse, unsymmetric systems of linear equations appear frequently in areas such as chemical engineering. One way of speeding up the solution of these linear systems is to solve them in parallel by reordering the unsymmetric matrix into a bordered block-diagonal (BBD) form. A multilevel ordering algorithm is presented in this paper. Numerical results of the algorithm are given to demonstrate that this algorithm gives better orderings than existing algorithms.