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At least 289 records · Page 16

Reaching bandwidth saturation using transparent injection parallelization

Although logically available, applications may not exploit enough instantaneous communication concurrency to maximize network utilization on HPC systems. This is exacerbated in hybrid programming models that combine single program multiple data with OpenMP or CUDA. We present the design of a “multi-threaded” runtime able to transparently increase the instantaneous network concurrency and to provide near saturation bandwidth, independent of the application configuration and dynamic behavior. The runtime offloads communication requests from application level tasks to multiple communication servers. The servers use system specific performance models to attain network saturation. Our techniques alleviate the need for spatial and temporal application level message concurrency optimizations. Experimental results show improved message throughput and bandwidth by as much as 150% for 4 KB messages on InfiniBand and by as much as 120% for 4 KB messages on Cray Aries. For more complex operations such as all-to-all collectives, we observe as much as 30% speedup. This translates into 23% speedup on 12,288 cores for a NAS FT implemented using FFTW. We observe as much as 76% speedup on 1500 cores for an already optimized UPC+OpenMP geometric multigrid application using hybrid parallelism. For the geometric multigrid GPU implementation, we observe as much as 44% speedup on 512 GPUs.

Chaimov, Nicholas↗

Yahoo! Compute Coop (YCC). A Next-Generation Passive Cooling Design for Data Centers

The purpose of the Yahoo! Compute Coop (YCC) project is to research, design, build and implement a greenfield "efficient data factory" and to specifically demonstrate that the YCC concept is feasible for large facilities housing tens of thousands of heat-producing computing servers. The project scope for the Yahoo! Compute Coop technology includes: - Analyzing and implementing ways in which to drastically decrease energy consumption and waste output. - Analyzing the laws of thermodynamics and implementing naturally occurring environmental effects in order to maximize the "free-cooling" for large data center facilities. "Free cooling" is the direct usage of outside air to cool the servers vs. traditional "mechanical cooling" which is supplied by chillers or other Dx units. - Redesigning and simplifying building materials and methods. - Shortening and simplifying build-to-operate schedules while at the same time reducing initial build and operating costs. Selected for its favorable climate, the greenfield project site is located in Lockport, NY. Construction on the 9.0 MW critical load data center facility began in May 2009, with the fully operational facility deployed in September 2010. The relatively low initial build cost, compatibility with current server and network models, and the efficient use of power and water are all key features that make it a highly compatible and globally implementable design innovation for the data center industry. Yahoo! Compute Coop technology is designed to achieve 99.98% uptime availability. This integrated building design allows for free cooling 99% of the year via the building's unique shape and orientation, as well as server physical configuration.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

Dairy Analytics and Nutrient Analysis (DANA) Prototype System User Manual

This document is a user manual for the Dairy Analytics and Nutrient Analysis (DANA) model. DANA provides an analysis of dairy anaerobic digestion technology and allows users to calculate biogas production, co-product valuation, capital costs, expenses, revenue and financial metrics, for user customizable scenarios, dairy and digester types. The model provides results for three anaerobic digester types; Covered Lagoons, Modified Plug Flow, and Complete Mix, and three main energy production technologies; electricity generation, renewable natural gas generation, and compressed natural gas generation. Additional options include different dairy types, bedding types, backend treatment type as well as numerous production, and economic parameters. DANA’s goal is to extend the National Market Value of Anaerobic Digester Products analysis (informa economics, 2012; Innovation Center, 2011) to include a greater and more flexible set of regional digester scenarios and to provide a modular framework for creation of a tool to support farmer and investor needs. Users can set up scenarios from combinations of existing parameters or add new parameters, run the model and view a variety of reports, charts and tables that are automatically produced and delivered over the web interface. DANA is based in the INL’s analysis architecture entitled Generalized Environment for Modeling Systems (GEMS) , which offers extensive collaboration, analysis, and integration opportunities and greatly speeds the ability construct highly scalable web delivered user-oriented decision tools. DANA’s approach uses server-based data processing and web-based user interfaces, rather a client-based spreadsheet approach. This offers a number of benefits over the client-based approach. Server processing and storage can scale up to handle a very large number of scenarios, so that analysis of county, even field level, across the whole U.S., can be performed. Server based databases allow dairy and digester parameters be held and managed in a single managed data repository, while allows users to customize standard values and perform individual analysis. Server-based calculations can be easily extended, versions and upgrades managed, and any changes are immediately available to all users. This user manual describes how to use and/or modify input database tables, run DANA, view and modify reports.

09 BIOMASS FUELS↗

Ceph Parallel File System Evaluation Report

We used Data Direct Networks’ (DDN) SFA10K as the storage backend during this evaluation. It consists of 200 SAS drives and 280 SATA drives, organized into various RAID levels by two active-active RAID controllers. The exported RAID groups by these controllers are driven by four hosts. Each host has two InfiniBand (IB) QDR connections to the storage backend. We used a single dualport Mellanox connectX IB card per host. By our calculation, this setup can saturate SFA10K’s maximum theoretical throughput (~12 GB/s). Our Ceph testbed employs a collection of testing nodes. These nodes and their roles are summarized in Table 1. In the following discussion, we use “servers”, “osd servers”, “server hosts” interchangeably. We will emphasize with “client” prefix when we want to distinguish it from above. All hosts (client and servers) were configured with Redhat 6.3 and kernel version 3.5.1 initially, and later upgraded to 3.9 (rhl-ceph image), Glibc 2.12 with syncfs support, locally patched. We used the Ceph 0.48 and 0.55 release in the initial tests, upgraded to 0.64 and then to 0.67RC for a final round of tests.

Wang, Feiyi↗

Extreme Efficiency 240 Vac to Load Data Center Power Delivery Topologies and Control

The research explored innovative new circuit topologies and power converter architectures for data center power delivery, from the 240 V ac voltage at the input of a server rack, down to the less than 1 V dc power supply of the latest microprocessors. The research pursued three parallel tracks to increase the power conversion efficiency and to reduce the overall size of the servers: 1) An innovative new ac-dc power converter topology which enables improved efficiency through use of a novel direct step-down topology, well suited for the popular 48V dc power distribution. 2) A new series-stacked power delivery approach for servers comprising a large number of similar loads, such as hard drives in storage servers. The approach greatly reduces the power conversion losses, and achieves efficiency well over 99%. 3) A new family of hybrid switched-capacitor power converters that enable improved efficiency and reduced size through the use of dense ceramic capacitors and new circuit topologies that leverage GaN and low-voltage Si transistor technology. Together, the accomplished research achieved the goal of reducing the power conversion losses in datacenters, thereby reducing greenhouse gas emissions, operating costs, and overall electricity consumption.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

Deployment of inference as a service at the US CMS Tier-2 data centers

Coprocessors, especially GPUs, will be a vital ingredient of data production workflows at the HL-LHC. At CMS, the GPU-as-a-service approach for production workflows is implemented by the SONIC project (Services for Optimized Network Inference on Coprocessors). SONIC provides a mechanism for outsourcing computationally demanding algorithms, such as neural network inference, to remote servers, where requests from multiple clients are intelligently distributed across multiple GPUs by a load-balancing service. This talk highlights the recent progress in deploying SONIC at selected U.S. CMS Tier-2 data centers. Using realistic CMS Run3 data processing workflows, such as those containing transformer-based algorithms, we demonstrate how SONIC is integrated into the production-like environment to enable accelerated inference offloading. We will present developments from both the client and server sides, including production job and data center configurations for NVIDIA and AMD GPUs. We will also present performance scaling benchmarks and discuss the challenges of operating SONIC in CMS production, such as server discovery, GPU saturation, fallback server logic, etc.

Holzman, Burt↗

A Prototype Software to Demonstrate a Data Catalog for Hanford Environmental Datasets

Ensuring that data on long-term environmental remediation at the Hanford Site is high-quality, traceable, and easily accessible is an ongoing challenge, complicated by decades of data collection, multiple contractors maintaining data sources, and the wide range of data types. A centralized data catalog, known as the Hanford Environmental Information and Data Index (HEIDI), has been under development as part of the Hanford Environmental Data Management (HEDM) program to address these challenges. HEIDI fulfills a critical need to bring together a wide range of data types and sizes from multiple authoritative data sources, while documenting the data pedigree and quality information (i.e., traceable to the data source/originator). This document describes additional development and maturation of the HEIDI prototype. Key accomplishments included deploying the catalog software, Esri Geoportal Server, on a server accessible to Hanford Local Area Network users, conducting cybersecurity evaluations, investigating integrated authentication solutions, and conducting functional testing of the catalog prototype. The server-based deployment enabled targeted feedback, leading to enhancements including improved accessibility features and an expanded metadata schema. Specifications for the server-based deployment of the prototype catalog and the HEIDI metadata schema are provided in this document to support subsequent HEIDI deployment by the U.S. Department of Energy Richland Operations Office.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

The Raid distributed database system

Raid, a robust and adaptable distributed database system for transaction processing (TP), is described. Raid is a message-passing system, with server processes on each site to manage concurrent processing, consistent replicated copies during site failures, and atomic distributed commitment. A high-level layered communications package provides a clean location-independent interface between servers. The latest design of the package delivers messages via shared memory in a configuration with several servers linked into a single process. Raid provides the infrastructure to investigate various methods for supporting reliable distributed TP. Measurements on TP and server CPU time are presented, along with data from experiments on communications software, consistent replicated copy control during site failures, and concurrent distributed checkpointing. A software tool for evaluating the implementation of TP algorithms in an operating-system kernel is proposed.

Bhargava, Bharat↗

Deceit: A flexible distributed file system

Deceit, a distributed file system (DFS) being developed at Cornell, focuses on flexible file semantics in relation to efficiency, scalability, and reliability. Deceit servers are interchangeable and collectively provide the illusion of a single, large server machine to any clients of the Deceit service. Non-volatile replicas of each file are stored on a subset of the file servers. The user is able to set parameters on a file to achieve different levels of availability, performance, and one-copy serializability. Deceit also supports a file version control mechanism. In contrast with many recent DFS efforts, Deceit can behave like a plain Sun Network File System (NFS) server and can be used by any NFS client without modifying any client software. The current Deceit prototype uses the ISIS Distributed Programming Environment for all communication and process group management, an approach that reduces system complexity and increases system robustness.

Siegel, Alex↗

Tradeoffs in implementing primary-backup protocols

One way to implement a fault-tolerant service is by using multiple servers that fail independently. The state of the service is replicated and distributed among these servers, and updates are coordinated so that even when a subset of the servers fail, the service remains available. A common approach to structuring such replicated services is to designate one server as the primary and all the others as backups. Clients make requests by sending messages only to the primary. If the primary fails, then a failover occurs and one of the backups takes over. This service architecture is commonly called the primary-backup or the primary-copy approach. In most such primary-backup protocols, when the primary receives a client request, it informs the backups about the request, and then responds to the client. Informally, this primary-backup protocol is non-blocking if the primary does not wait for an acknowledgement from the backups before it sends the response; otherwise, it is blocking. Most of the existing protocols are blocking as non-blocking protocols cannot be constructed for some kinds of failures. However, it is shown that non-blocking protocols can be constructed for most of the process and communication failures that are expected to occur in the primary-backup systems of the future. Since non-blocking protocols can theoretically achieve the smallest possible response time, this paper analyzes these protocols under various system parameters. Two kinds of non-blocking protocols are analyzed: one in which the processes use point-to-point communication to exchange messages, and the other in which processes use hardware broadcasts.

Budhiraja, Navin↗

Volume serving and media management in a networked, distributed client/server environment

The E-Systems Modular Automated Storage System (EMASS) is a family of hierarchical mass storage systems providing complete storage/'file space' management. The EMASS volume server provides the flexibility to work with different clients (file servers), different platforms, and different archives with a 'mix and match' capability. The EMASS design considers all file management programs as clients of the volume server system. System storage capacities are tailored to customer needs ranging from small data centers to large central libraries serving multiple users simultaneously. All EMASS hardware is commercial off the shelf (COTS), selected to provide the performance and reliability needed in current and future mass storage solutions. All interfaces use standard commercial protocols and networks suitable to service multiple hosts. EMASS is designed to efficiently store and retrieve in excess of 10,000 terabytes of data. Current clients include CRAY's YMP Model E based Data Migration Facility (DMF), IBM's RS/6000 based Unitree, and CONVEX based EMASS File Server software. The VolSer software provides the capability to accept client or graphical user interface (GUI) commands from the operator's console and translate them to the commands needed to control any configured archive. The VolSer system offers advanced features to enhance media handling and particularly media mounting such as: automated media migration, preferred media placement, drive load leveling, registered MediaClass groupings, and drive pooling.

Herring, Ralph H.↗

The design of a petabyte archive and distribution system for the NASA ECS project

The NASA EOS Data and Information System (EOSDIS) Core System (ECS) will contain one of the largest data management systems ever built - the ECS Science and Data Processing System (SDPS). SDPS is designed to support long term Global Change Research by acquiring, producing, and storing earth science data, and by providing efficient means for accessing and manipulating that data. The first two releases of SDPS, Release A and Release B, will be operational in 1997 and 1998, respectively. Release B will be deployed at eight Distributed Active Archiving Centers (DAAC's). Individual DAAC's will archive different collections of earth science data, and will vary in archive capacity. The storage and management of these data collections is the responsibility of the SDPS Data Server subsystem. It is anticipated that by the year 2001, the Data Server subsystem at the Goddard DAAC must support a near-line data storage capacity of one petabyte. The development of SDPS is a system integration effort in which COTS products will be used in favor of custom components in very possible way. Some software and hardware capabilities required to meet ECS data volume and storage management requirements beyond 1999 are not yet supported by available COTS products. The ECS project will not undertake major custom development efforts to provide these capabilities. Instead, SDPS and its Data Server subsystem are designed to support initial implementations with current products, and provide an evolutionary framework that facilitates the introduction of advanced COTS products as they become available. This paper provides a high-level description of the Data Server subsystem design from a COTS integration standpoint, and discussed some of the major issues driving the design. The paper focuses on features of the design that will make the system scalable and adaptable to changing technologies.

Caulk, Parris M.↗

CINTEX: International Interoperability Extensions to EOSDIS

A large part of the research under this cooperative agreement involved working with representatives of the DLR, NASDA, EDC, and NOAA-SAA data centers to propose a set of enhancements and additions to the EOSDIS Version 0 Information Management System (V0 IMS) Client/Server Message Protocol. Helen Conover of ITSL led this effort to provide for an additional geographic search specification (WRS Path/Row), data set- and data center-specific search criteria, search by granule ID, specification of data granule subsetting requests, data set-based ordering, and the addition of URLs to result messages. The V0 IMS Server Cookbook is an evolving document, providing resources and information to data centers setting up a VO IMS Server. Under this Cooperative Agreement, Helen Conover revised, reorganized, and expanded this document, and converted it to HTML. Ms. Conover has also worked extensively with the IRE RAS data center, CPSSI, in Russia. She served as the primary IMS contact for IRE-CPSSI and as IRE-CPSSI's liaison to other members of IMS and Web Gateway (WG) development teams. Her documentation of IMS problems in the IRE environment (Sun servers and low network bandwidth) led to a general restructuring of the V0 IMS Client message polling system. to the benefit of all IMS participants. In addition to the IMS server software and documentation. which are generally available to CINTEX sites, Ms. Conover also provided database design documentation and consulting, order tracking software, and hands-on testing and debug assistance to IRE. In the final pre-operational phase of IRE-CPSSI development, she also supplied information on configuration management, including ideas and processes in place at the Global Hydrology Resource Center (GHRC), an EOSDIS data center operated by ITSL.

Graves, Sara J.↗

Future Directions for Astronomical Image Display

In our "Future Directions for Astronomical Image Display" project, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) and the National Optical Astronomy Observatories (NOAO) will evolve our existing image display software into a fully extensible, cross-platform image display server that can run stand-alone or be integrated seamlessly into astronomical analysis systems. We will build a Plug-in Image Extension (PIE) server for astronomy, consisting of a modular image display engine that can be customized using "plug-in" technology. We will create plug-ins that reproduce all the current functionality of SAOtng. We also will devise a messaging system and a set of distributed, shared data objects to support integrating the PIE server into astronomical analysis systems. Finally, we will migrate our PIE server, plug-ins, and messaging software from Unix and the X Window System to a platform-independent architecture that utilizes cross-platform technology such as Tcl/Tk or Java.

Mandel, Eric↗

A SPDS Node to Support the Systematic Interpretation of Cosmic Ray Data

The purpose of this project was to establish and maintain a Space Physics Data System (SPDS) node that supports the analysis and interpretation of current and future galactic cosmic ray (GCR) measurements by (1) providing on-line databases relevant to GCR propagation studies; (2) providing other on-line services, such as anonymous FTP access, mail list service and pointers to e-mail address books, to support the cosmic ray community; (3) providing a mechanism for those in the community who might wish to submit similar contributions for public access; (4) maintaining the node to assure that the databases remain current; and (5) investigating other possibilities, such as CD-ROM, for public dissemination of the data products. Shortly after the original grant to support these activities was established at Louisiana State University a detailed study of alternate choices for the node hardware was initiated. The chosen hardware was an Apple Workgroup Server 9150/120 consisting of a 120 MHz PowerPC 601 processor, 32 MB of memory, two I GB disks and one 2 GB disk. This hardware was ordered and installed and has been operating reliably ever since. A preliminary version of the database server was available during the first year effort and was used as part of the very successful SPDS demonstration during the Rome, Italy International Cosmic Ray Conference. For this server version we were able to establish the html and anonymous FTP server software, develop a Web page structure which can be easily modified to include new items, provide an on-line database of charge changing total cross sections, include the cross section prediction software of Silberberg & Tsao as well as Webber, Kish and Schrier for download access, and provide an on-line bibliography of the cross section measurement references by the Transport Collaboration. The preliminary version of this SPDS Cosmic Ray node was examined by members of the C&H SPDS committee and returned comments were used to refine the implementation.

Source record↗

The Network Configuration of an Object Relational Database Management System

The networking and implementation of the Oracle Database Management System (ODBMS) requires developers to have knowledge of the UNIX operating system as well as all the features of the Oracle Server. The server is an object relational database management system (DBMS). By using distributed processing, processes are split up between the database server and client application programs. The DBMS handles all the responsibilities of the server. The workstations running the database application concentrate on the interpretation and display of data.

Diaz, Philip↗

Accommodating Heterogeneity in a Debugger for Distributed Computations

In an ongoing project at NASA Ames Research Center, we are building debugger for distributed computations running on a heterogeneous set of machines. Historically, such debuggers have been built as front-ends to existing source-level debuggers on the target platforms. In effect, these back-end debuggers are providing a collection of debugger services to a client. The major drawback is that because of inconsistencies among the back-end debuggers, the front-end must use a different protocol when talking to each back-end debugger. This can make the front-end quite complex. We have avoided this complexity problem by defining the client-server debugger protocol. While it does require vendors to adapt their existing debugger code to meet the protocol, vendors are generally interested in doing so because the approach has several advantages. In addition to solving the heterogenous platform debugging problem, it will be pos~sible to write interesting debugger user interfaces that can be easily ported across a variety of machines. This will likely encourage investment in application-domain specific debuggers. In fact, the user interface of our debugger will be geared to scientists developing computational fluid dynamics codes. This paper describes some of the problems encountered in developing a portable debugger for heterogenous, distributed computing and how the architecture of our debugger avoids them. It then provides a detailed description of the debugger client-server protocol. Some of the more interesting attributes of the protocol are: (1) It is object-oriented; (2) It uses callback functions to capture the asynchronous nature of debugging in a procedural fashion; (3) It contains abstractions, such as in-line instrumentation, for the debugging of computationally intensive programs; (4) For remote debugging, it has operations that enable the implementor to optimize message passing traffic between client and server. The soundness of the protocol is being tested through the implementation of a prototype client and server pair.

Hood, Robert↗

Novel Advancements in Internet-Based Real Time Data Technologies

AZ Technology has been working with MSFC Ground Systems Department to find ways to make it easier for remote experimenters (RPI's) to monitor their International Space Station (ISS) payloads in real-time from anywhere using standard/familiar devices. AZ Technology was awarded an SBIR Phase I grant to research the technologies behind and advancements of distributing live ISS data across the Internet. That research resulted in a product called "EZStream" which is in use on several ISS-related projects. Although the initial implementation is geared toward ISS, the architecture and lessons learned are applicable to other space-related programs. This paper presents the high-level architecture and components that make up EZStream. A combination of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) and custom components were used and their interaction will be discussed. The server is powered by Apache's Jakarta-Tomcat web server/servlet engine. User accounts are maintained in a My SQL database. Both Tomcat and MySQL are Open Source products. When used for ISS, EZStream pulls the live data directly from NASA's Telescience Resource Kit (TReK) API. TReK parses the ISS data stream into individual measurement parameters and performs on-the- fly engineering unit conversion and range checking before passing the data to EZStream for distribution. TReK is provided by NASA at no charge to ISS experimenters. By using a combination of well established Open Source, NASA-supplied. and AZ Technology-developed components, operations using EZStream are robust and economical. Security over the Internet is a major concern on most space programs. This paper describes how EZStream provides for secure connection to and transmission of space- related data over the public Internet. Display pages that show sensitive data can be placed under access control by EZStream. Users are required to login before being allowed to pull up those web pages. To enhance security, the EZStream client/server data transmissions can be encrypted to preclude interception. EZStream was developed to make use of a host of standard platforms and protocols. Each are discussed in detail in this paper. The I3ZStream server is written as Java Servlets. This allows different platforms (i.e. Windows, Unix, Linux . Mac) to host the server portion. The EZStream client component is written in two different flavors: JavaBean and ActiveX. The JavaBean component is used to develop Java Applet displays. The ActiveX component is used for developing ActiveX-based displays. Remote user devices will be covered including web browsers on PC#s and scaled-down displays for PDA's and smart cell phones. As mentioned. the interaction between EZStream (web/data server) and TReK (data source) will be covered as related to ISS. EZStream is being enhanced to receive and parse binary data stream directly. This makes EZStream beneficial to both the ISS International Partners and non-NASA applications (i.e. factory floor monitoring). The options for developing client-side display web pages will be addressed along with the development of tools to allow creation of display web pages by non-programmers.

Myers, Gerry↗