78709
STICS: SCSI-to-IP cache for storage area networks
Abstract Data storage plays an essential role in today's fast-growing data-intensive network services. New standards and products emerge very rapidly for networked data storage. Given the mature Internet infrastructure, the overwhelming preference among the IT community recently is using IP for storage networking because of economy and convenience. iSCSI is one of the most recent standards that allow SCSI protocols to be carried out over IP networks. However, there are many disparities between SCSI and IP in terms of protocols, speeds, bandwidths, data unit sizes, and design considerations that prevent fast and efficient deployment of storage area network (SAN) over IP. This paper introduces SCSI-to-IP cache storage (STICS), a novel storage architecture that couples reliable and high-speed data caching with low-overhead conversion between SCSI and IP protocols. A STICS block consists of one or several storage devices and an intelligent processing unit with CPU and RAM. The storage devices are used to cache and store data while the intelligent processing unit carries out the caching algorithm, protocol conversion, and self-management functions. Through the efficient caching algorithm and localization of certain unnecessary protocol overheads, STICS can significantly improve performance, reliability, and scalability over current iSCSI systems. Furthermore, STICS can be used as a basic plug-and-play building block for data storage over IP. Analogous to “cache memory” invented several decades ago for bridging the speed gap between CPU and memory, STICS is the first-ever “cache storage” for bridging the gap between SCSI and IP making it possible to build an efficient SAN over IP. We have implemented software STICS prototype on Linux operating system. Numerical results using popular benchmarks such as vxbench, IOzone, PostMark, and EMC's trace have shown a dramatic performance gain over the current iSCSI implementation.
36641724
A new and efficient FFT algorithm for distributed memory systems
This paper presents a new and optimal parallel implementation of multidimensional fast Fourier transform algorithm on distributed memory multiprocessors. Its optimality is obtained by minimizing the number of message passings necessary, at the cost of increase in message length. This distinctive feature of the new algorithm effectively utilizes the important architectural property of most of today's distributed memory multiprocessors-wormhole routing for interprocessor communications. By using the algebra of stride permutations and tenser products as a mathematical tool, we are able to derive and formulate an efficient data partition and communication scheme that reduces communication cost from O(N/sup 2/) required for the best known FFT to O(N) on an N/sup 2/-processor machine. Our data partition scheme is natural and efficient for solving discretized boundary value problems such as partial differential equations and finite element analysis. To evaluate the actual performance of our new algorithm in comparison with other existing parallel FFT algorithms, we have carried out implementation experiments on the Intel's Touchstone Delta machine.
11786279
Effects of Arbitration Protocols on the Performance of Multiple-Bus Multiprocessors
2566279
PRINS: Optimizing Performance of Reliable Internet Storages
Distributed storage systems employ replicas or erasure code to ensure high reliability and availability of data. Such replicas create great amount of network traffic that negatively impacts storage performance, particularly for distributed storage systems that are geographically dispersed over a wide area network (WAN). This paper presents a performance study of our new data replication methodology that minimizes network traffic for data replications. The idea is to replicate the parity of a data block upon each write operation instead of the data block itself. The data block will be recomputed back at the replica storage site upon receiving the parity. We name the new methodology PRINS (Parity Replication in IP-Network Storages). PRINS trades off highspeed computation for communication that is costly and more likely to be the performance bottleneck for distributed storages. By leveraging the parity computation that exists in common storage systems (RAID), our PRINS does not introduce additional overhead but dramatically reduces network traffic. We have implemented PRINS using iSCSI protocol over a TCP/IP network interconnecting a cluster of PCs as storage nodes. We carried out performance measurements on Oracle database, Postgres database, MySQL database, and Ext2 file system using TPC-C, TPC-W, and Micro benchmarks. Performance measurements show up to 2 orders of magnitudes bandwidth savings of PRINS compared to traditional replicas. A queueing network model is developed to further study network performance for large networks. It is shown that PRINS reduces response time of the distributed storage systems dramatically.
229042
Introducing a New Cache Design into Vector Computers
Introduces an innovative cache design for vector computers, called prime-mapped cache. By utilizing the special properties of a Mersenne prime, the new design does not increase the critical path length of a processor, nor does it increase the cache access time as compared to existing cache organizations. The prime-mapped cache minimizes cache miss ratio caused by line interferences that have been shown to be critical for numerical applications by previous investigators. With negligibly additional hardware cost, significant performance gains are obtained by adding the proposed cache memory to an existing vector computer. The performance of the design is studied analytically, using a generic vector computation model. The analytical model is validated through extensive simulation experiments. A performance analysis for various vector access patterns shows that the prime-mapped cache performs significantly better than conventional cache organizations in the vector processing environment. The performance gain will increase with the increase of the speed gap between processors and memories. >
8600912
Performance Evaluation of Distributed Web Server Architectures under E-Commerce Workloads
One of the central and key components to make the ECommerce a success is high performance and highly reliable web server architectures. Extensive research has been sparked aiming at improving web server performance. Fundamental to the goal of improving web server performance is a solid understanding of behavior and performance of web servers. However, very little research is found on evaluating web server performance based on realistic workload representing E-Commerce applications which are usually exemplified by a large amount of CGI (Common Gateway Interface), ASP (Active Server Page), or Servlet (Java Server-side interface) calls. This paper presents a performance study under the workload with a mixture of static web page requests, CGI requests, Servlet requests, and database queries. System throughputs and user response times are measured for five different server architectures consisting of PCs that run both a web server program and a database. We observed that performance behaviors of the web server architectures considered under this mixed workload are quite different from that under static page workload and sometimes counter-intuitive. Our performance results suggest that there is a large room for potential performance improvement for web servers.
1155416
Co-Localization from Labeled and Unlabeled Data Using Graph Laplacian
This paper addresses the problem of recovering the locations of both mobile devices and access points from radio signals, a problem which we call colocalization, by exploiting both labeled and unlabeled data from mobile devices and access points. We first propose a solution using Latent Semantic Indexing to construct the relative locations of the mobile devices and access points when their absolute locations are unknown. We then propose a semi-supervised learning algorithm based on manifold to obtain the absolute locations of the devices. Both solutions are finally combined together in terms of graph Laplacian. Extensive experiments are conducted in wireless local-area networks, wireless sensor networks and radio frequency identification networks. The experimental results showthat we can achieve high accuracy with much less calibration effort as compared to several previous systems.
225
A dynamic approach to characterizing termination of general logic programs
We present a new characterization of termination of general logic programs. Most existing termination analysis approaches rely on some static information about the structure of the source code of a logic program, such as modes/types, norms/level mappings, models/interargument relations, and the like. We propose a dynamic approach that employs some key dynamic features of an infinite (generalized) SLDNF-derivation, such as repetition of selected subgoals and recursive increase in term size. We also introduce a new formulation of SLDNF-trees, called generalized SLDNF-trees. Generalized SLDNF-trees deal with negative subgoals in the same way as Prolog and exist for any general logic programs.
10032259
Effective and efficient dimensionality reduction for large-scale and streaming data preprocessing
Dimensionality reduction is an essential data preprocessing technique for large-scale and streaming data classification tasks. It can be used to improve both the efficiency and the effectiveness of classifiers. Traditional dimensionality reduction approaches fall into two categories: feature extraction and feature selection. Techniques in the feature extraction category are typically more effective than those in feature selection category. However, they may break down when processing large-scale data sets or data streams due to their high computational complexities. Similarly, the solutions provided by the feature selection approaches are mostly solved by greedy strategies and, hence, are not ensured to be optimal according to optimized criteria. In this paper, we give an overview of the popularly used feature extraction and selection algorithms under a unified framework. Moreover, we propose two novel dimensionality reduction algorithms based on the orthogonal centroid algorithm (OC). The first is an incremental OC (IOC) algorithm for feature extraction. The second algorithm is an orthogonal centroid feature selection (OCFS) method which can provide optimal solutions according to the OC criterion. Both are designed under the same optimization criterion. Experiments on Reuters Corpus Volume-1 data set and some public large-scale text data sets indicate that the two algorithms are favorable in terms of their effectiveness and efficiency when compared with other state-of-the-art algorithms.
18512433
An Algebraic Approach to Conflict Resolution in Planning
This paper presents an algebra for conflict resolution in nonlinear planning. A set of conflicts in a plan is considered as a constraint network. Each node in the network represents a conflict, and is associated with a set of alternative ways for resolving it. Thus, resolving conflicts in a plan corresponds to selecting a set of consistent resolution methods so that, after they are applied to the plan, every conflict can be removed. The paper discusses the representional issues related to the conflict resolution, presents an algebra for resolving conflicts, and illustrates that some modified algorithms for preprocessing networks of constraints can greatly enhance the efficiency of conflict resolution.
1988413
Test strategies for cost-sensitive decision trees
In medical diagnosis, doctors must often determine what medical tests (e.g., X-ray and blood tests) should be ordered for a patient to minimize the total cost of medical tests and misdiagnosis. In this paper, we design cost-sensitive machine learning algorithms to model this learning and diagnosis process. Medical tests are like attributes in machine learning whose values may be obtained at a cost (attribute cost), and misdiagnoses are like misclassifications which may also incur a cost (misclassification cost). We first propose a lazy decision tree learning algorithm that minimizes the sum of attribute costs and misclassification costs. Then, we design several novel "test strategies" that can request to obtain values of unknown attributes at a cost (similar to doctors' ordering of medical tests at a cost) in order to minimize the total cost for test examples (new patients). These test strategies correspond to different situations in real-world diagnoses. We empirically evaluate these test strategies, and show that they are effective and outperform previous methods. Our results can be readily applied to real-world diagnosis tasks. A case study on heart disease is given throughout the paper