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ISTC-CC NEWSLETTER
RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS
Ling Liu's SC13 paper "Large Graph Processing Without the Overhead" featured by HPCwire.
ISTC-CC provides a listing of useful benchmarks for cloud computing.
Another list highlighting Open Source Software Releases.
Second GraphLab workshop should be even bigger than the first! GraphLab is a new programming framework for graph-style data analytics.
ISTC–CC March 2012 Status Report
Summary:
The Cloud ISTC had a strong month for research papers, with 6 papers published (2 papers in ASPLOS'12, and 1 each in PPoPP'12, DATE'12, SHAW-3, and SIGCSE'12), 6 papers accepted (3 papers in ISCA'12, and 1 each in CCGrid'12, TPDS, and Comp Arch Letters), and 3 papers submitted. Also notable is the number of cross-university collaborations underway. We kicked off our Cloud Computing webinar series, with talks by Raja Sambasivan (CMU) and Mike Franklin (UC Berkeley). The talks are broadcast live via videoconferencing to selected locations within the spoke Universities and also via WebEx to Intel Employees. Contact Jeff Parkhurst if you would like to receive Cloud Computing webinar announcements. Kai Li (Princeton) was elected into National Academy of Engineering "for advances in data storage and distributed computer systems." Election to NAE is one of the highest honors an engineer can achieve. Justin Rattner (Intel CTO) visited the two Pittsburgh ISTCs (see picture below), and kicked off the first ISTC Social. Intel's University Collaboration Office "Showcase" in Santa Clara will be held on June 27. All ISTCs and IRIs will be present. Please plan to attend!!
Details:
ISTC Mission: Four inter-related research pillars (themes) architected to create a strong foundation for cloud computing of the future
The research agenda of the ISTC-CC is composed of the following four themes
- Specialization: Explores specialization as a primary means for order of magnitude improvements in efficiency (e.g., energy), including use of emerging technologies like non-volatile memory and specialized cores.
- Automation: Addresses cloud’s particular automation challenges, focusing on order of magnitude efficiency gains from smart resource allocation/scheduling and greatly improved problem diagnosis capabilities.
- Big Data: Addresses the critical need for cloud computing to extend beyond traditional big data usage (primarily, search) to efficiently and effectively support Big Data analytics, including the continuous ingest, integration, and exploitation of live data feeds (e.g., video or twitter).
- To theEdge: Explores new frameworks for edge/cloud cooperation that can efficiently and effectively exploit billions of context-aware clients and enable cloud-assisted client applications whose execution spans client devices, edge-local cloud resources, and core cloud resources.
Participants
Academic PI: Greg Ganger(CMU)
Executive Sponsor: Wen Hann Wang (CSR)
Managing Sponsor: Rich Uhlig (CSR-SAL)
Program Director: Jeff Parkhurst (APR)
Intel PI: Phil Gibbons
Intel Researchers:Michael Kiminsky, Mike Kozuch, Babu Pillai
AcademicPartners: Dave Andersen, Guy Blelloch, Garth Gibson, Carlos Guestrin, Mor Harchol-Balter, Todd Mowry, Onur Mutlu, Priya Narasimhan, M. Satyanarayanan, and Dan Siewiorek (CMU); Mike Freedman, Kai Li, and Margaret Martonosi (Princeton); Anthony Joseph, Randy Katz, and Ion Stoica (UC Berkeley); Ada Gavrilovska, Ling Liu, Calton Pu, Karsten Schwan, and Sudha Yalamanchili (GA Tech).
Technical highlights
- Cross-university collaborations continue to blossom. Wyatt Lloyd (Princeton grad student), Michael Kaminsky (IL), Dave Andersen (CMU) and Mike Freedman (Princeton) are continuing to make progress on "COPS2"; the implementation is underway and the team is targeting OSDI'12 in early May. Hrishi Amur (GA Tech grad student), Michael Kaminsky (IL), and Dave Andersen (CMU) have made good progress on a new memory-efficient version of MapReduce, which focuses on aggressive map-side aggregation; the evaluation is underway and the team is targeting OSDI'12. Chengwei Wang (GA Tech grad student) is collaborating with Soila Pertet Kavulya and Priya Narasimhan plus other students (CMU) on runtime methods for behavior detection in data center systems. There are also ongoing collaborations between UC Berkeley, CMU, and IL, as reported in previous monthlies.
- Michael Kozuch completed the upgrade of all but one of the Open Cirrus switches in the Open Cirrus cluster. However, this month was also plagued with a number of disruptive events stemming from (a) an upgrade of the Tashi (IaaS) infrastructure, (b) a node spewing strange network traffic, seemingly from a DRAM failure, and (3) a rack going down due to the failure of a UPS unit. This last issue may require replacement of the unit. The Tashi review board approved the second release of the Tashi cluster management tool (http://incubator.apache.org/tashi/).
- Timmy Zhu, Anshul Gandhi (CMU grad students), Mor Harchol-Balter (CMU) and Michael Kozuch (IL) completed a technical report reporting the feasibility of scaling a caching tier (memcached) of a three tier internet service architecture. The report indicates that (1) as demand decreases, memcached costs may dominate the service providers costs, (2) the caching tier may be scaled down with little drop in performance provided that the request stream is skewed, and (3) relatively simple techniques may enable the caching tier to preserve the most-recently used cached data even when this information is not exported by the caching tier.
- Publications summary for the past month (partial list):
- 3 papers submitted: to IEEE Cloud 2012 conference (2 papers) and to HotStorage '12
- 6 papers accepted: to ISCA'12 (3 papers), to Comp Arch Letters, to CCGrid'12, to TPDS
- 6 paper published: to ASPLOS 2012 (2 papers), to DATE '12, to PPoPP 2012, to SIGCSE '12 and to 3rd Workshop on SoCs, Heterogeneous Architectures and Workloads (SHAW-3)
Schedule of upcoming events and milestones
- April 1: Joulesort competition deadline; several submissions are planned.
- April 2: Deva Bodas (Intel) will be presenting at the Cloud Computing webinar.
- April 5: Intel Labs Trendspotting Summit on "Big Data", at Intel RA1 building.
- May 3: OSDI'12 submission deadline; a number of submissions are planned.
- May 11: Parallel Data Lab (PDL) visit day at CMU.
- June 15: SOCC'12 submission deadline; a number of submissions are planned.
- June 21-22: The next Open Cirrus Summit will be held in Beijing.
- June 26: ISTC research to be highlighted at Research@Intel day in San Francisco.
- June 27: Intel's University Collaboration Office "Showcase" in Santa Clara. This event will run 8 am to 6 pm and gather IL researchers, faculty, and students from each of the ISTCs and each of the Intel Research Institutes for a day of presentations, demos, posters, and brainstorming. All Intel employees are invited to attend.
- August 21: BOA Annual Review in Pittsburgh
Sponsor group interaction highlights
- Georgia Tech researchers are interacting with Intel to explore the potential role of NVRAM in future cloud and server systems.
- Babu Pillai (IL) is working with Diana Hu, Greg Regnier and Ted Willke (Intel SAL) on a research project building a scalable cloud-based service for computer vision applications. The goal of this work is to demonstrate coarse-grained parallelization of computer vision workloads scales well with the computing resources available, and serves as an important complement to typical fine-grained compiler and vectorization approaches to parallelization. The system will be based on the Sprout framework, extended to support multiple simultaneous clients, and a set of computer vision algorithms from the academic research community.
Other ISTC highlights
- Kai Li (Princeton) was elected into National Academy of Engineering (NAE) "for advances in data storage and distributed computer systems." Election to NAE is one of the highest honors an engineer can achieve. Kai joins Randy Katz and Dan Siewiorek as ISTC-CC faculty who are NAE members.
- Several ISTC-CC students were recognized by Facebook for their excellent work and strong potential: Hyeontaek Lim (CMU), who works on the FAWN project, and Michelle Mazurek (CMU) each received one of 12 Facebook fellowships. Bin Fan (CMU) and Wyatt Lloyd (Princeton) were named as finalists in the fellowship competition.
- Randy Katz (UC Berkeley) was appointed to the Board of Advisors of ConteXtream Inc., a leading provider of cloud-scale network virtualization.
- Phil Gibbons (IL) and Garth Gibson (CMU) accepted invitations to the program committee of the first IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering (I2CE'13).
- Michael Kozuch attended the Berkeley BEARS event on February 23, visiting both the ParLab and AMPlab as part of that event. The theme for 2012 was "Big Data". Slides from the faculty talks, including one by AMPlab faculty Michael Jordan, can be found at http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/BEARS/.
List of publications
[List of the publications that were PUBLISHED by center researchers during
the month. This does not include submissions or acceptances, just
publications.]
- “Experiences Teaching MapReduce in the Cloud,” Ariel Rabkin, Charles Reiss, Randy Katz, and David Patterson, ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium (SIGCSE), 2012
- “Benchmarking Next Generation Hardware Platforms: An Experimental Approach,” Vishakha Gupta, Adit Ranadive, Ada Gavrilovska, and Karsten Schwan, 3rd Workshop on SoC, Heterogeneous Architectures and Workloads (SHAW-3), in conjunction with HPCA’12
- “Internally Deterministic Parallel Algorithms Can Be Fast,” Guy E. Blelloch, Jeremy T. Fineman, Phillip B. Gibbons, and Julian Shun, in Sigplan/ACM Conference on Principles and Practices of Parallel Programming (PPoPP), 2012
- “Region Scheduling: Efficiently Using the Cache Architectures of Modern Multi-Core Platforms,” Min Lee and Karsten Schwan, in 17th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS), 2012
- “Bottleneck Identification and Scheduling in Multithreaded Applications,” Jose A. Joao, M. Aater Suleman, Onur Mutlu, and Yale N. Patt, in 17th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS), 2012
- "Error Patterns in MLC NAND Flash Memory: Measurement, Characterization, and Analysis,” Yu Cai, Eric F. Haratsch, Onur Mutlu, and Ken Mai, in Design, Automation, and Test in Europe Conference (DATE), 2012
List of presentations
- Karsten Schwan (GA Tech) presented "Virtualized Manycore Systems," Priyanka Tembey, Ada Gavrilovska, Karsten Schwan, at the Microsoft Cambridge Systems Workshop, March 2012.
- Julian Shun (CMU grad student) presented "Internally Deterministic Parallel Algorithms Can Be Fast," at PPoPP'12, New Orleans, LA, February 2012.
- Min Lee (GA Tech grad student) presented "Region Scheduling: Efficiently Using the Cache Architectures via Page-level Affinity," at ASPLOS'12, London, UK, March 2012.
- Onur Mutlu (CMU) presented "Bottleneck Identification and Scheduling in Multithreaded Applications," at ASPLOS'12, London, UK, March 2012.
- Onur Mutlu (CMU) presented "Some Opportunities and Obstacles in Cross-Layer and Cross-Component (Power) Management," at the NSF Workshop on Cross-Layer Power Optimization and Management (NSF CPOM), Los Angeles, CA, February 2012.
- Yu Cai (CMU grad student) presented "Error Patterns in MLC NAND Flash Memory: Measurement, Characterization, and Analysis" Proceedings of the Design, Automation, and Test in Europe Conference (DATE), Dresden, Germany, March 2012.