1674566
Server-Based Data Push Architecture for Multi-Processor Environments
Data access delay is a major bottleneck in utilizing current high-end computing (HEC) machines. Prefetching, where data is fetched before CPU demands for it, has been considered as an effective solution to masking data access delay. However, current client-initiated prefetching strategies, where a computing processor initiates prefetching instructions, have many limitations. They do not work well for applications with complex, non-contiguous data access patterns. While technology advances continue to increase the gap between computing and data access performance, trading computing power for reducing data access delay has become a natural choice. In this paper, we present a server-based data-push approach and discuss its associated implementation mechanisms. In the server-push architecture, a dedicated server called Data Push Server (DPS) initiates and proactively pushes data closer to the client in time. Issues, such as what data to fetch, when to fetch, and how to push are studied. The SimpleScalar simulator is modified with a dedicated prefetching engine that pushes data for another processor to test DPS based prefetching. Simulation results show that L1 Cache miss rate can be reduced by up to 97% (71% on average) over a superscalar processor for SPEC CPU2000 benchmarks that have high cache miss rates.
417212
Taxonomy of Data Prefetching for Multicore Processors
Data prefetching is an effective data access latency hiding technique to mask the CPU stall caused by cache misses and to bridge the performance gap between processor and memory. With hardware and/or software support, data prefetching brings data closer to a processor before it is actually needed. Many prefetching techniques have been developed for single-core processors. Recent developments in processor technology have brought multicore processors into mainstream. While some of the single-core prefetching techniques are directly applicable to multicore processors, numerous novel strategies have been proposed in the past few years to take advantage of multiple cores. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art prefetching techniques, and proposes a taxonomy that classifies various design concerns in developing a prefetching strategy, especially for multicore processors. We compare various existing methods through analysis as well.
43007315
The impact of smart disks and spatial reuse property on RAID-5 storage systems
RAID storage systems using SCSI and traditional disk drives cannot meet the growing demand of new I/O intensive applications. New technologies such as smart disks and SSA are being proposed to improve the performance, scalability, and reliability of RAID systems. The objective of this work is to investigate the impact of smart disks and SSA's spatial reuse property on the performance of RAID-5 storage systems. In order to perform this work, we have enhanced CMU's RAIDframe simulator so that it accurately models the overhead of current SCSI and SSA protocols, and we have created smart disk models which include on-drive XOR logic and on-drive caches. We observe that neither smart disks alone nor spatial reuse property alone has much impact on RAID system performance. However, if smart disks and spatial reuse property are properly used in combination, RAID-5 system performance and scalability can be further enhanced. In particular, we propose a parity caching approach to improve the performance of small writes.
12297104
CoStore: a reliable and highly available storage system using clusters
The CoStore cluster architecture is proposed to construct a reliable and highly available storage system. A prototype CoStore was implemented and its performance was measured with the cluster being mirrored in various network environments. The preliminary results demonstrate that there is little impact on performance if the cluster is mirrored in efficient campus network environments with high bandwidth and low latency. As a result the CoStore architecture considerably reinforces a storage system's preparedness for disaster recovery without sacrificing performance.
61649411
Parallel I/O prefetching using MPI file caching and I/O signatures
Parallel I/O prefetching is considered to be effective in improving I/O performance. However, the effectiveness depends on determining patterns among future I/O accesses swiftly and fetching data in time, which is difficult to achieve in general. In this study, we propose an I/O signature-based prefetching strategy. The idea is to use a predetermined I/O signature of an application to guide prefetching. To put this idea to work, we first derived a classification of patterns and introduced a simple and effective signature notation to represent patterns. We then developed a toolkit to trace and generate I/O signatures automatically. Finally, we designed and implemented a thread-based client-side collective prefetching cache layer for MPI-IO library to support prefetching. A prefetching thread reads I/O signatures of an application and adjusts them by observing I/O accesses at runtime. Experimental results show that the proposed prefetching method improves I/O performance significantly for applications with complex patterns.
14925300
A Taxonomy of Data Prefetching Mechanisms
Data prefetching has been considered an effective way to mask data access latency caused by cache misses and to bridge the performance gap between processor and memory. With hardware and/or software support, data prefetching brings data closer to a processor before it is actually needed. Many prefetching techniques have been proposed in the last few years to reduce data access latency by taking advantage of multi-core architectures. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy that classifies various design concerns in developing a prefetching strategy. We discuss various prefetching strategies and issues that have to be considered in designing a prefetching strategy for multi-core processors.
135614560
Gold nanohole arrays for biochemical sensing fabricated by soft UV nanoimprint lithography
We report on results of fabrication and optical characterisation of sub-250nm periodic gold nanohole arrays on glass by using UV nanoimprint lithography (UV-NIL) combined with both reactive ion etching (RIE) and Cr/Au lift-off processes. The transmission spectra of the fabricated nanohole gratings were measured for different hole diameters and periods. We also show preliminary results of chemical sensing after surface modification of the gold hole arrays. In agreement with the theoretical prediction, we found that any change in the dielectric index of the surrounding environment of the metallic array produces a transmission peak red shift.
37797167
A wide dynamic range CMOS image sensor with pulse-frequency-modulation and in-pixel amplification
This paper briefly examines the pros and cons of CMOS pulse-frequency-modulation (PFM) digital pixel sensors. A pulse-frequency-modulation digital pixel sensor with in-pixel amplification is proposed to improve the resolution of the pixel sensor at low illumination. The proposed PFM digital pixel sensor offers the characteristics of a reduced integration time when the level of illumination is low with the fill factor comparable to that of PFM digital pixel sensors without in-pixel amplification. The proposed digital image sensor has been designed in [email protected] 1.8V CMOS technology and validated using Spectre from Cadence Design Systems with BSIM3V3 device models. Simulation results demonstrate that the dynamic range of the proposed PFM digital pixel sensor with in-pixel amplification is 20dB larger as compared with that of PFM digital pixel sensors without in-pixel amplification. The increased dynamic range is obtained in the low illumination condition where PFM digital pixel sensors without in-pixel amplification cease the operation due to the low photo current.
28086202
A new elliptic equation rational expansion method and its application to the shallow long wave approximate equations
A new elliptic equation rational expansion method is presented by a new general ansatz, which is a direct and unified algebraic method for constructing multiple and more general travelling wave solution for nonlinear partial differential equation and implemented in a computer algebraic system. The proposed method is applied to consider the shallow long wave approximate equation and obtains rich new families of the exact solutions, including rational form solitary wave, rational form triangular periodic, rational form Jacobi and Weierstrass doubly periodic solutions.
46139740
Automatic Path-Oriented Test Data Generation Using a Multi-population Genetic Algorithm
Automatic path-oriented test data generation is an undecidable problem and genetic algorithm (GA) has been used to test data generation since 1992. In favor of MATLAB, a multi-population genetic algorithm (MPGA) was implemented, which selects individuals for free migration based on their fitness values. Applying MPGA to generating path-oriented test data generation is a new and meaningful attempt. After depicting how to transform path-oriented test data generation into an optimization problem, basic process flow of path-oriented test data generation using GA was presented. Using a triangle classifier as program under test, experimental results show that MPGA based approach can generate path-oriented test data more effectively and efficiently than simple GA based approach does.
37352290
Comparison of Two Fitness Functions for GA-Based Path-Oriented Test Data Generation
Automatic path-oriented test data generation is not only a crucial problem but also a hot issue in the research area of software testing today. As a robust metaheuritstic search method in complex spaces, genetic algorithm (GA) has been used to path-oriented test data generation since 1992 and outperforms other approaches. A fitness function based on branch distance (BDBFF) and another based on normalized extended Hamming distance (SIMILARITY) are both applied in GA-based path-oriented test data generation. To compare performance of these two fitness functions, a triangle classification program was chosen as the example. Experimental results show that BDBFF-based approach can generate path-oriented test data more effectively and efficiently than SIMILARITY- based approach does.