11717151
Trust but verify: monitoring remotely executing programs for progress and correctness
The increased popularity of grid systems and cycle sharing across organizations requires scalable systems that provide facilities to locate resources, to be fair in the use of those resources, and to monitor jobs executing on remote systems. This paper describes the GridCop system which allows a computation on a remote, and potentially fraudulent, host system to be monitored for progress and execution correctness. A novel feature of our system is that it constructs cooperating submitter and host programs from the original program, and these programs allow both progress and execution correctness to be monitored with negligible overhead while providing protection against common fraudulent behaviors. Experimental results show that the overhead of this monitoring is low on both the submitting and host machines. We describe compiler algorithms that allow the required monitoring code to be automatically generated.
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.
1334946
Program counter based techniques for dynamic power management
Reducing energy consumption has become one of the major challenges in designing future computing systems. We propose a novel idea of using program counters to predict I/O activities in the operating system. We present a complete design of program-counter access predictor (PCAP) that dynamically learns the access patterns of applications and predicts when an I/O device can be shut down to save energy. PCAP uses path-based correlation to observe a particular sequence of program counters leading to each idle period, and predicts future occurrences of that idle period. PCAP differs from previously proposed shutdown predictors in its ability to: (1) correlate I/O operations to particular behavior of the applications and users, (2) carry prediction information across multiple executions of the applications, and (3) attain better energy savings while incurring low mispredictions.
463081
Topology-Aware Routing in Structured Peer-to-Peer Overlay Networks
Structured peer-to-peer (p2p) overlay networks like CAN, Chord, Pastry and Tapestry offer a novel platform for a variety of scalable and decentralized distributed applications. They provide efficient and fault-tolerant routing, object location and load balancing within a self-organizing overlay network. One important aspect of these systems is how they exploit network proximity in the underlying Internet. We present a study of topology-aware routing approaches in p2p overlays, identify proximity neigbor selection as the most promising technique, and present an improved design in Pastry. Results obtained via analysis and via simulation of two large-scale topology models indicate that it is possible to efficiently exploit network proximity in self-organizing p2p substrates. Proximity neighbor selection incurs only a modest additional overhead for organizing and maintaining the overlay network. The resulting locality properties improve application performance and reduce network usage in the Internet substantially. Finally, we show that the impact of proximity neighbor selection on the load balancing in the p2p overlay is minimal.
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.
43789567
A Self-Organizing Flock of Condors
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.
27295065
Automatic extraction of titles from general documents using machine learning
In this paper, we propose a machine learning approach to title extraction from general documents. By general documents, we mean documents that can belong to any one of a number of specific genres, including presentations, book chapters, technical papers, brochures, reports, and letters. Previously, methods have been proposed mainly for title extraction from research papers. It has not been clear whether it could be possible to conduct automatic title extraction from general documents. As a case study, we consider extraction from Office including Word and PowerPoint. In our approach, we annotate titles in sample documents (for Word and PowerPoint, respectively) and take them as training data, train machine learning models, and perform title extraction using the trained models. Our method is unique in that we mainly utilize formatting information such as font size as features in the models. It turns out that the use of formatting information can lead to quite accurate extraction from general documents. Precision and recall for title extraction from Word are 0.810 and 0.837, respectively, and precision and recall for title extraction from PowerPoint are 0.875 and 0.895, respectively in an experiment on intranet data. Other important new findings in this work include that we can train models in one domain and apply them to other domains, and more surprisingly we can even train models in one language and apply them to other languages. Moreover, we can significantly improve search ranking results in document retrieval by using the extracted titles.
6062616
Estimating face pose by facial asymmetry and geometry
A robust pose estimation approach is proposed by combining facial appearance asymmetry and 3D geometry in a coarse-to-fine framework. The rough face pose is first estimated by analyzing the asymmetry of the distribution of the facial component detection confidences on an image, which actually implies an intrinsic relation between the face pose and the facial appearance. Then, this rough face pose, as well as error bandwidth, is utilized into a 3D-to-2D geometrical model matching to refine the pose estimation. The proposed approach is able to track a face with fast motion in front of cluttered background and recover its pose robustly and accurately in real- time. Experiment results are provided to demonstrate its efficiency and accuracy.
36322621
An improved diffusion algorithm for dynamic load balancing
Abstract Diffusion type algorithms [1, 3, 11] are some of the most popular algorithms for scheduling in dynamic load balancing. It is known however that this type of algorithm can suffer from slow convergence. In this paper the performance of the diffusion type algorithms is improved, while retaining the nearest neighbour communication requirement, through the use of Chebyshev polynomials. It is also proved that both the diffusion algorithm and the improved diffusion algorithm have an optimal property in terms of the amount of load migrated. Numerical results are given comparing the algorithm with the diffusion algorithm as well as a fast algorithm that requires global communication.
2595430
A new approach to intranet search based on information extraction
This paper is concerned with 'intranet search'. By intranet search, we mean searching for information on an intranet within an organization. We have found that search needs on an intranet can be categorized into types, through an analysis of survey results and an analysis of search log data. The types include searching for definitions, persons, experts, and homepages. Traditional information retrieval only focuses on search of relevant documents, but not on search of special types of information. We propose a new approach to intranet search in which we search for information in each of the special types, in addition to the traditional relevance search. Information extraction technologies can play key roles in such kind of 'search by type' approach, because we must first extract from the documents the necessary information in each type. We have developed an intranet search system called 'Information Desk'. In the system, we try to address the most important types of search first - finding term definitions, homepages of groups or topics, employees' personal information and experts on topics. For each type of search, we use information extraction technologies to extract, fuse, and summarize information in advance. The system is in operation on the intranet of Microsoft and receives accesses from about 500 employees per month. Feedbacks from users and system logs show that users consider the approach useful and the system can really help people to find information. This paper describes the architecture, features, component technologies, and evaluation results of the system.