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Ling Liu's SC13 paper "Large Graph Processing Without the Overhead" featured by HPCwire.
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Second GraphLab workshop should be even bigger than the first! GraphLab is a new programming framework for graph-style data analytics.
ISTC-CC Abstract
Lightning in the Cloud: A Study of Transient Bottlenecks on n-Tier Web Application Performance
Proceedings of 2nd USENIX Conference on Timely Results in Operating Systems (TRIOS'14), October 2014.
Qingyang Wang*^, Yasuhiko Kanemasa†, Jack Li*, Chien-An Lai*, Chien-An Cho*,
Yuji Nomura†, Calton Pu*
* College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology
^ Louisiana State University
† System Software Laboratories, FUJITSU LABORATORIES LTD.
In this paper, we describe an experimental study of very long response time (VLRT) requests in the latency long tail problem. Applying micro-level event analysis on fine-grained measurement data from n-tier application benchmarks, we show that very short bottlenecks (from tens to hundreds of milliseconds) can cause queue overflows that propagate through an n-tier system, resulting in dropped messages and VLRT requests due to timeout and retransmissions. Our study shows that even at moderate CPU utilization levels, very short bottlenecks arise from several system layers, including Java garbage collection, anti-synchrony between workload bursts and DVFS clock rate adjustments, and statistical workload interferences among co-located VMs.
As a simple model for a variety of causes of VLRT requests, very short bottlenecks form the basis for a discussion of general remedies for VLRT requests, regardless of their origin. For example, methods that reduce or avoid queue amplification in an n-tier system result in non-trivial trade-offs among system components and their configurations. Our results show interesting challenges remain in both causes and effective remedies of very short bottlenecks.
FULL PAPER: pdf
