1921533
A superior two-phase locking algorithm and its performance
Abstract Concurrent transactions, during their execution, may conflict over common data entities. Such conflicts are resolved by concurrency control mechanisms by use of operations such as transaction rollback and/or transaction blocking. There are a number of mechanisms available and each applies these operations in different ways to resolve conflicts and claims some performance advantages. In this work we have analyzed the behavior of a new deadlock-free two-phase locking mechanism, called Cautious Waiting, and have compared its performance with other well-known mechanisms. The mechanism is conceptually quite simple; therefore it is not likely to be difficult to implement. We show that this mechanism performs consistently better under a wide range of parameter values than the other mechanisms investigated here. We also show that it is more robust, in the sense that it is less sensitive to load increases and other changes in parameter settings. In contrast, we show that one of the most commonly used mechanisms is not as robust and efficient under stress situations.
16958826
Recent Advances and Research Problems in Data Warehousing
In the recent years, the database community has witnessed the emergence of a new technology, namely data warehousing. A data warehouse is a global repository that stores pre-processed queries on data which resides in multiple, possibly heterogeneous, operational or legacy sources. The information stored in the data warehouse can be easily and efficiently accessed for making effective decisions. The On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) tools access data from the data warehouse for complex data analysis, such as multidimensional data analysis, and decision support activities. Current research has lead to new developments in all aspects of data warehousing, however, there are still a number of problems that need to be solved for making data warehousing effective. In this paper, we discuss recent developments in data warehouse modelling, view maintenance, and parallel query processing. A number of technical issues for exploratory research are presented and possible solutions are discussed.
29393244
Semantic Caching and Query Processing
Semantic caching is very attractive for use in distributed systems due to the reduced network traffic and the improved response time. It is particularly efficient for a mobile computing environment, where the bandwidth of wireless links is a major performance bottleneck. Previous work either does not provide a formal semantic caching model, or lacks efficient query processing strategies. This paper extends the existing research in three ways: formal definitions associated with semantic caching are presented, query processing strategies are investigated and, finally, the performance of the semantic cache model is examined through a detailed simulation study.
8261257
TCOT-A Timeout-Based Mobile Transaction Commitment Protocol
We present a transaction commit protocol, "Transaction Commit On Timeout (TCOT)," based on a "timeout" approach for Mobile Database Systems (MDS), which can be universally used to reach a final transaction termination decision (e.g., commit, abort, etc.) in any message-oriented system. Particularly suited for a wireless environment, a timeout mechanism is the only way to minimize the impact of the slow and unreliable wireless link. We compare TCOT to a modified version of 2PC to show its superiority based on commit time.
39362526
Main memory database recovery algorithms and their performance
In main memory systems recovery becomes more complex mainly due to the volatility of main memory and the elimination of the separation of data storage (disk) and data processing locations (main memory). In a disk based database system, it is the disk copy that represents the stable database restored after a system failure; but in MDBSs, the main memory copy of the database must be recovered. The paper discusses the recovery issues in MDBSs and presents a somewhat detailed performance study of two recovery algorithms, one using a shadow approach and the other update-in-place.<<ETX>>
34436430
An Integrated Data Structure with Multiple Access Paths for Database Systems and its Performance
Abstract In the past a number of file organizations have been proposed for processing different types of queries efficiently. To our knowledge none of the existing file organizations is capable of supporting all types of accesses equally efficiently. In this paper we have taken a different approach for designing an integated data structure which offers multiple access paths for processing different types of queries efficiently. The data structure reported here can be implemented on disk based as well as main memory database systems, however, in this paper we report its behavior mainly in main memory database environment. Our approach is to fuse those data structures which offer an efficient access paths for a particular type. To show the feasibility of our scheme we fused the B+-tree, the grid file and extendible hashing structures, using a proper interface. We implemented and measured its performance through simulation modeling. Our results show that the data structure does improve concurrency and offers a higher throughput for a variety of transaction processing workloads. We argue that our scheme is different than creating secondary indexes for improving concurrency. In the absence of a data strucure which can provide all types of access equally efficiently, an integrated data structure is an acceptable solution which offers an efficient way for increasing the performance of database management systems.
5564142
Provable algorithms for parallel generalized sweep scheduling
Abstract We present provably efficient parallel algorithms for sweep scheduling, which is a commonly used technique in radiation transport problems, and involves inverting an operator by iteratively sweeping across a mesh from multiple directions. Each sweep involves solving the operator locally at each cell. However, each direction induces a partial order in which this computation can proceed. On a distributed computing system, the goal is to schedule the computation, so that the length of the schedule is minimized. Due to efficiency and coupling considerations, we have an additional constraint, namely, a mesh cell must be processed on the same processor along each direction. Problems similar in nature to sweep scheduling arise in several other applications, and here we formulate a combinatorial generalization of this problem that captures the sweep scheduling constraints,and call it the generalized sweep scheduling problem. Several heuristics have been proposed for this problem; see [S. Pautz, An algorithm for parallel S n sweeps on unstructured meshes, Nucl. Sci. Eng. 140 (2002) 111–136; S. Plimpton, B. Hendrickson, S. Burns, W. McLendon, Parallel algorithms for radiation transport on unstructured grids, Super Comput. (2001)] and the references therein; but none of these have provable worst case performance guarantees. Here we present a simple, almost linear time randomized algorithm for the generalized sweep scheduling problem that (provably) gives a schedule of length at most O ( log 2 n ) times the optimal schedule for instances with n cells, when the communication cost is not considered, and a slight variant, which coupled with a much more careful analysis, gives a schedule of (expected) length O ( log m log log log m ) times the optimal schedule for m processors. These are the first such provable guarantees for this problem. The algorithm can be extended with an additional multiplicative factor in the case when we have inter-processor communication latency, in the models of Rayward-Smith [UET scheduling with inter-processor communication delays, Discrete Appl. Math. 18 (1) (1987) 55–71] and Hwang et al. [Scheduling precedence graphs in systems with inter-processor communication times, SIAM J. Comput. 18(2) (1989) 244–257]. Our algorithms are extremely simple, and use no geometric information about the mesh; therefore, these techniques are likely to be applicable in more general settings. We also design a priority based list schedule using these ideas, with the same theoretical guarantee, but much better performance in practice; combining this algorithm with a simple block decomposition also lowers the overall communication cost significantly. Finally, we perform a detailed experimental analysis of our algorithm. Our results indicate that the algorithm compares favorably with the length of the schedule produced by other natural and efficient parallel algorithms proposed in the literature [S. Pautz, An Algorithm for parallel S n sweeps on unstructured meshes, Nucl. Sci. Eng. 140 (2002) 111–136; S. Plimpton, B. Hendrickson, S. Burns, W. McLendon, Parallel algorithms for radiation transport on unstructured grids, Super Comput. (2001)].
12696238
Clustering Based On Association Rule Hypergraphs
Clustering in data mining is a discovery process that groups a set of data such that the intracluster similarity is maximized and the intercluster similarity is minimized. These discovered clusters are used to explain the characteristics of the data distribution. In this paper we propose a new methodology for clustering related items using association rules, and clustering related transactions using clusters of items. Our approach is linearly scalable with respect to the number of transactions. The frequent item-sets used to derive association rules are also used to group items into a hypergraph edge, and a hypergraph partitioning algorithm is used to nd the clusters. Our experiments indicate that clustering using association rule hypergraphs holds great promise in several application domains. Our experiments with stock-market data and congressional voting data show that this clustering scheme is able to successfully group items that belong to the same group. Clustering of items can also be used to cluster the transactions containing these items. Our experiments with congressional voting data show that this method is quite e ective in nding clusters of transactions that correspond to either democrat or republican voting patterns. Compared to the existing clustering algorithmAutoclass, our algorithm produced comparable quality clusters in the congressional voting data. This work was supported by NSF grant ASC-9634719, Army Research O ce contract DA/DAAH04-95-1-0538, Cray Research Inc. Fellowship, and IBM partnership award, the content of which does not necessarily re ect the policy of the government, and no ofcial endorsement should be inferred. Access to computing facilities was provided by AHPCRC, Minnesota Supercomputer Institute, Cray Research Inc., and NSF grant CDA-9414015. See http://www.cs.umn.edu/ han for an extended version of this paper and other related papers.
30844152
Multiple cooperating mobile manipulators
The main goal of the paper is to present a framework and basic control algorithms for coordinating a small team of robots in tasks that involve grasping large objects and transporting them in a two-dimensional environment with obstacles. Each robot consists of a mobile platform and an arm. Some arms are passive while others are active. Our previous work (1998) addressed the manipulator design, the architecture, and the communication between robots. In this paper we address the control of the manipulators, the coordination between the platforms for a team of two or three cooperating robots, and the handling of flexible large objects.
21050185
A Framework and Architecture for Multirobot Coordination
In this paper, we present a framework and the software architecture for the deployment of multiple autonomous robots in an unstructured and unknown environment with applications ranging from scouting and reconnaissance, to search and rescue and manipulation tasks. Our software framework provides the methodology and the tools that enable robots to exhibit deliberative and reactive behaviors in autonomous operation, to be reprogrammed by a human operator at run-time, and to learn and adapt to unstructured, dynamic environments and new tasks, while providing performance guarantees. We demonstrate the algorithms and software on an experimental testbed that involves a team of car-like robots using a single omnidirectional camera as a sensor without explicit use of odometry.
11619174
Provable algorithms for parallel sweep scheduling on unstructured meshes
We present provably efficient parallel algorithms for sweep scheduling on unstructured meshes. Sweep scheduling is a commonly used technique in radiation transport problems, and involves inverting an operator by iteratively sweeping across a mesh. Each sweep involves solving the operator locally at each cell. However, each direction induces a partial order in which this computation can proceed. On a distributed computing system, the goal is to schedule the computation, so that the length of the schedule is minimized. Several heuristics have been proposed for this problem; but none of the heuristics have worst case performance guarantees. We present a simple, almost linear time randomized algorithm which (provably) gives a schedule of length at most O(log/sup 2/n) times the optimal schedule for instances with n cells, when the communication cost is not considered, and a slight variant, which coupled with a much more careful analysis, gives a schedule of (expected) length O(logmlogloglogm) times the optimal schedule for m processors. These are the first such provable guarantees for this problem. We also design a priority based list schedule using these ideas, with the same theoretical guarantee, but much better performance in practice. We complement our theoretical results with extensive empirical analysis. The results show that (i) our algorithm performs very well and has significantly better performance guarantee in practice and (ii) the algorithm compares favorably with other natural and efficient parallel algorithms proposed in the literature [S. Pautz, (2002), S. Plimpton et al., (2001)].