62224653
Effectively Utilizing Global Cluster Memory for Large Data-Intensive Parallel Programs
Large scientific parallel applications demand large amounts of memory space. Current parallel computing platforms schedule jobs without fully knowing their memory requirements. This leads to uneven memory allocation in which some nodes are overloaded. This, in turn, leads to disk paging, which is extremely expensive in the context of scientific parallel computing. To solve this problem, we propose a new peer-to-peer solution called parallel network RAM. This approach avoids the use of disk, better utilizes available RAM resources, and will allow larger problems to be solved while reducing the computational, communication, and synchronization overhead typically involved in parallel applications. We proposed several different parallel network RAM designs and evaluated the performance of each under different conditions. We discovered that different designs are appropriate in different situations.
18230
Indexable PLA for Efficient Similarity Search
Similarity-based search over time-series databases has been a hot research topic for a long history, which is widely used in many applications, including multimedia retrieval, data mining, web search and retrieval, and so on. However, due to high dimensionality (i.e. length) of the time series, the similarity search over directly indexed time series usually encounters a serious problem, known as the "dimensionality curse". Thus, many dimensionality reduction techniques are proposed to break such curse by reducing the dimensionality of time series. Among all the proposed methods, only Piecewise Linear Approximation (PLA) does not have indexing mechanisms to support similarity queries, which prevents it from efficiently searching over very large time-series databases. Our initial studies on the effectiveness of different reduction methods, however, show that PLA performs no worse than others. Motivated by this, in this paper, we re-investigate PLA for approximating and indexing time series. Specifically, we propose a novel distance function in the reduced PLA-space, and prove that this function indeed results in a lower bound of the Euclidean distance between the original time series, which can lead to no false dismissals during the similarity search. As a second step, we develop an effective approach to index these lower bounds to improve the search efficiency. Our extensive experiments over a wide spectrum of real and synthetic data sets have demonstrated the efficiency and effectiveness of PLA together with the newly proposed lower bound distance, in terms of both pruning power and wall clock time, compared with two state-of-the-art reduction methods, Adaptive Piecewise Constant Approximation (APCA) and Chebyshev Polynomials (CP).
6911930
LANDMARC: Indoor Location Sensing Using Active RFID
Growing convergence among mobile computing devices and embedded technology sparks the development and deployment of “context-aware” applications, where location is the most essential context. In this paper we present LANDMARC, a location sensing prototype system that uses Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology for locating objects inside buildings. The major advantage of LANDMARC is that it improves the overall accuracy of locating objects by utilizing the concept of reference tags. Based on experimental analysis, we demonstrate that active RFID is a viable and cost-effective candidate for indoor location sensing. Although RFID is not designed for indoor location sensing, we point out three major features that should be added to make RFID technologies competitive in this new and growing market.
12060317
DiCAS: An Efficient Distributed Caching Mechanism for P2P Systems
Peer-to-peer networks are widely criticized for their inefficient flooding search mechanism. Distributed hash table (DHT) algorithms have been proposed to improve the search efficiency by mapping the index of a file to a unique peer based on predefined hash functions. However, the tight coupling between indices and hosting peers incurs high maintenance cost in a highly dynamic network. To properly balance the tradeoff between the costs of indexing and searching, we propose the distributed caching and adaptive search (DiCAS) algorithm, where indices are passively cached in a group of peers based on a predefined hash function. Guided by the same function, adaptive search selectively forwards queries to "matched" peers with a high probability of caching the desired indices. The search cost is reduced due to shrunk searching space. Different from the DHT solutions, distributed caching loosely maps the index of a file to a group of peers in a passive fashion, which saves the cost of updating indices. Our simulation study shows that the DiCAS protocol can significantly reduce the network search traffic with the help of small cache space contributed by each individual peer
35965067
Dynamic Layer Management in Superpeer Architectures
Superpeer unstructured P2P systems have been found to be very effective by dividing the peers into two layers, superlayer and leaf-layer, in which message flooding is only conducted among superlayer and all leaf-peers are represented by corresponding superpeers. However, current superpeer systems do not employ any effective layer management schemes, so the transient and low-capacity peers are allowed to act as superpeers. Moreover, the lack of an appropriate size ratio maintenance mechanism on superlayer to leaf-layer makes the system's search performance far from being optimal. We present one workload model aimed at reducing the weighted overhead of a network. Using our proposed workload model, a network can determine an optimal layer size ratio between leaf-layer and superlayer. We then propose a dynamic layer management algorithm, DLM, which can maintain an optimal layer size ratio and adaptively elect and adjust peers between superlayer and leaf-layer. DLM is completely distributed in the sense that each peer decides to be a superpeer or a leaf-peer independently without global knowledge. DLM could effectively help a superpeer P2P system maintain the optimal layer size ratio and designate peers with relatively long lifetime and large capacities as superpeers, and the peers with short lifetime and low capacities as leaf-peers under highly dynamic network situations. We demonstrate that the quality of a superpeer system is significantly improved under the DLM scheme by comprehensive simulations.
848425
Location awareness in unstructured peer-to-peer systems
Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing has emerged as a popular model aiming at further utilizing Internet information and resources. However, the mechanism of peers randomly choosing logical neighbors without any knowledge about underlying physical topology can cause a serious topology mismatch between the P2P overlay network and the physical underlying network. The topology mismatch problem brings great stress in the Internet infrastructure. It greatly limits the performance gain from various search or routing techniques. Meanwhile, due to the inefficient overlay topology, the flooding-based search mechanisms cause a large volume of unnecessary traffic. Aiming at alleviating the mismatching problem and reducing the unnecessary traffic, we propose a location-aware topology matching (LTM) technique. LTM builds an efficient overlay by disconnecting slow connections and choosing physically closer nodes as logical neighbors while still retaining the search scope and reducing response time for queries. LTM is scalable and completely distributed in the sense that it does not require any global knowledge of the whole overlay network. The effectiveness of LTM is demonstrated through simulation studies.
14501514
Semi-supervised Multi-label Learning by Constrained Non-negative Matrix Factorization
We present a novel framework for multi-label learning that explicitly addresses the challenge arising from the large number of classes and a small size of training data. The key assumption behind this work is that two examples tend to have large overlap in their assigned class memberships if they share high similarity in their input patterns. We capitalize this assumption by first computing two sets of similarities, one based on the input patterns of examples, and the other based on the class memberships of the examples. We then search for the optimal assignment of class memberships to the unlabeled data that minimizes the difference between these two sets of similarities. The optimization problem is formulated as a constrained Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) problem, and an algorithm is presented to efficiently find the solution. Compared to the existing approaches for multi-label learning, the proposed approach is advantageous in that it is able to explore both the unlabeled data and the correlation among different classes simultaneously. Experiments with text categorization show that our approach performs significantly better than several state-of-the-art classification techniques when the number of classes is large and the size of training data is small.
8159144
Processor frequency selection for SoC platforms for multimedia applications
Of late, there has been a considerable interest in generic and configurable system-on-chip platforms specifically targeted towards implementing multimedia applications. A number of such platforms offer the possibility of including processor soft cores which are highly customizable. For voltage/frequency scaled processors, such customization includes the selection of appropriate voltage/frequency operating points which are tuned to the application set to be mapped onto the platform. In this context, we present an analytical framework that can guide a system designer in identifying the frequency ranges that should be supported by the different processors of a platform architecture. This framework can also be used to identify how such frequency ranges depend on the different parameters of the architecture (such as on-chip buffer sizes), and the performance impacts associated with selecting a particular frequency range. In the case of multimedia streaming applications, identifying such performance impacts and tradeoffs involved in customizing a platform architecture is especially difficult due to the bursty nature of on-chip traffic arising out of multimedia processing and the high variability in their execution requirements. The framework presented here is designed to precisely capture such characteristics and can be used in the design-space exploration of energy-aware platform architectures for multimedia processing.
9804135
EPNet for Chaotic Time-Series Prediction
EPNet is an evolutionary system for automatic design of artificial neural networks (ANNs) [1, 2, 3]. Unlike most previous methods on evolving ANNs, EPNet puts its emphasis on evolving ANN'S behaviours rather than circuitry. The parsimony of evolved ANNs is encouraged by the sequential application of architectural mutations. In this paper, EP Net is applied to a couple of chaotic time-series prediction problems (i.e., the Mackey-Glass differential equation and the logistic map). The experimental results show that EPNet can produce very compact ANNs with good prediction ability in comparison with other algorithms.
7269331
Quadric Surface Extraction by Variational Shape Approximation
Based on Lloyd iteration, we present a variational method for extracting general quadric surfaces from a 3D mesh surface. This work extends the previous variational methods that extract only planes or special types of quadrics, i.e., spheres and circular cylinders. Instead of using the exact L2 error metric, we use a new approximate L2 error metric to make our method more efficient for computing with general quadrics. Furthermore, a method based on graph cut is proposed to smooth irregular boundary curves between segmented regions, which greatly improves the final results.
1463365
Approximating optimal spare capacity allocation by successive survivable routing
The design of survivable mesh based communication networks has received considerable attention in recent years. One task is to route backup paths and allocate spare capacity in the network to guarantee seamless communications services survivable to a set of failure scenarios. This is a complex multi-constraint optimization problem, called the spare capacity allocation (SCA) problem. This paper unravels the SCA problem structure using a matrix-based model, and develops a fast and efficient approximation algorithm, termed successive survivable routing (SSR). First, per-flow spare capacity sharing is captured by a spare provision matrix (SPM) method. The SPM matrix has a dimension the number of failure scenarios by the number of links. It is used by each demand to route the backup path and share spare capacity with other backup paths. Next, based on a special link metric calculated from SPM, SSR iteratively routes/updates backup paths in order to minimize the cost of total spare capacity. A backup path can be further updated as long as it is not carrying any traffic. Furthermore, the SPM method and SSR algorithm are generalized from protecting all single link failures to any arbitrary link failures such as those generated by Shared Risk Link Groups or all single node failures. Numerical results comparing several SCA algorithms show that SSR has the best trade-off between solution optimality and computation speed.