6136966
Operation Shipping for Mobile File Systems
This paper addresses a bottleneck problem in mobile file systems: the propagation of updated large tiles from a weakly-connected client to its servers. It proposes an efficient mechanism called operation shipping or operation-based update propagation. In the new mechanism, the client ships the user operation that updated the large files, rather than the files themselves, across the weak network. (in contrast, existing file systems use value shipping and ship the files.) The user operation is sent to a surrogate client that is strongly connected to the servers. The surrogate replays the user operation, regenerates the files, checks whether they are identical to the originals, and, it so, sends the files to the servers on behalf of the client. Care has been taken such that the new mechanism does not compromise correctness or server scalability. For example, we show how forward error correction (FEC) can restore minor reexecution discrepancies and, thus, make operation shipping work with more applications. Operation shipping can be further classified into two types: application-transparent and application-aware. Their feasibilities and benefits have been demonstrated by the design, implementation, and evaluation of a prototype extension to the Coda File System. In our controlled experiments, operation shipping achieved substantial performance improvements-network traffic reductions from 12 times to nearly 400 times and speedups in the range of 1.4 times to nearly 50 times.
2908844
Operation-based Update Propagation in a Mobile File System
In this paper we describe a technique called operation-based update propagation for efficiently transmitting updates to large files that have been modified on a weakly connected client of a distributed file system. In this technique, modifications are captured above the file-system layer at the client, shipped to a surrogate client that is strongly connected to a server, re-executed at the surrogate, and the resulting files transmitted from the surrogate to the server. If re-execution fails to produce a file identical to the original, the system falls back to shipping the file from the client over the slow network. We have implemented a prototype of this mechanism in the Coda File System on Linux, and demonstrated performance improvements ranging from 40 percents to nearly three orders of magnitude in reduced network traffic and elapsed time. We also found a novel use of forward error correction in this context.
7659070
Statistical Properties and Adaptive Tuning of Support Vector Machines
In this paper we consider the statistical aspects of support vector machines (SVMs) in the classification context, and describe an approach to adaptively tuning the smoothing parameter(s) in the SVMs. The relation between the Bayes rule of classification and the SVMs is discussed, shedding light on why the SVMs work well. This relation also reveals that the misclassification rate of the SVMs is closely related to the generalized comparative Kullback-Leibler distance (GCKL) proposed in Wahba (1999, Scholkopf, Burges, & Smola (Eds.), Advances in Kernel Methods—Support Vector Learning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). The adaptive tuning is based on the generalized approximate cross validation (GACV), which is an easily computable proxy of the GCKL. The results are generalized to the unbalanced case where the fraction of members of the classes in the training set is different than that in the general population, and the costs of misclassification for the two kinds of errors are different. The main results in this paper have been obtained in several places elsewhere. Here we take the opportunity to organize them in one place and note how they fit together and reinforce one another. Mostly the work of the authors is reviewed.
14456420
A replica control method for improving availability for read-only transactions
Data replication is often considered in distributed database systems to enhance availability and performance. The benefit of data replication, however can only be realized at the cost of maintaining the consistency of data. In particular, network partition failures make it more difficult to achieve high data availability while ensuring strong correctness criteria such as l-copy serializability. We propose a replica control method to improve the availability of data in the presence of network partition failures. Our method extends the traditional primary copy method by using the relaxed correctness criterion called insular consistency for large-scale distributed systems, where partition failures frequently occur. We focus on increasing the availability of data for read-only transactions. We introduce a version vector as a tool for guaranteeing insular consistency and present a mechanism that allows read-only transactions to be executed at any partition as long as the insular consistency is satisfied. An asynchronous update propagation mechanism is also employed to improve the performance of update operations. We also show that the proposed method is correct and give some performance considerations.
10452928
Detecting truncation point in steady-state simulation using chaos theory
In the steady-state simulation, it is important to identify initialization bias for the correct estimates of the simulation model under study. In this paper, the methods from chaos theory are applied to the determination of truncation points in the simulation data for controlling the initial bias. Two methods are proposed and evaluated based on their effectiveness for estimating the average waiting time in M/M/1(/spl infin/) queueing model.
12566781
Web-Based Simulation with Server Application Approach under Distributed Environment
591216
The HS File: A New Dynamic Signature File Method for Efficient Information Retrieval
Many works on the signature file methods have been made in the past, but they are mainly for static environments. However, many recent applications in practice require a dynamic information storage structure that effectively supports insertions, deletions and updates. Though there are a few signature file techiniques for dynamic environments, they suffer from serious performance degradation when query signature weights are light. In this paper, we propose a new dynamic signature file organization, called the hierarchical signature(HS) file, that solves the problem of light query signature weights. We perform simulation experiments by using wide range of parameter values. We show through performance comparison based on experiments that the HS file improves performance significantly in both the retrieval time and the storage over-head over the other dynamic signature file methods proposed earlier.