Distributed and Parallel Systems

Nishant Saurabh
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Paper accepted in Elsevier’s Journal of Blockchain: Research and Applications

Authors: Nikita Karandikar, Rockey Abhishek, Nishant Saurabh, Zhiming Zhao, Alexander Lercher, Ninoslav Marina, Radu Prodan, Chunming Rong, Antorweep Chakravorty

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bcra.2021.100016

Abstract: Peak mitigation is of interest to power companies as peak periods may require the operator to over provision supply in order to meet the peak demand. Flattening the usage curve can result in cost savings, both for the power companies and the end users. Integration of renewable energy into the energy infrastructure presents an opportunity to use excess renewable generation to supplement supply and alleviate peaks. In addition, demand side management can shift the usage from peak to off peak times and reduce the magnitude of peaks. In this work, we present a data driven approach for incentive based peak mitigation. Understanding user energy profiles is an essential step in this process. We begin by analysing a popular energy research dataset published by the Ausgrid corporation. Extracting aggregated user energy behavior in temporal contexts and semantic linking and contextual clustering give us insight into consumption and rooftop solar generation patterns. We implement, and performance test a blockchain based prosumer incentivization system. The smart contract logic is based on our analysis of the Ausgrid dataset. Our implementation is capable of supporting 792,540 customers with a reasonably low infrastructure footprint.

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Paper accepted in 17th IEEE eScience conference

Conference: https://escience2021.org/

Title: Where to Encode: A Performance Analysis of x86 and Arm-based Amazon EC2 Instances

Authors: Roland Mathá, Dragi Kimovski, Anatoliy Zabrovskiy, Christian Timmerer and Radu Prodan

Abstract: Video streaming became an undivided part of the Internet. To efficiently utilise the limited network bandwidth it is essential to encode the video content. However, encoding is a computationally intensive task, involving high-performance resources provided by private infrastructures or public clouds. Public clouds, such as Amazon EC2, provide a large portfolio of services and instances optimized for specific purposes and budgets. The majority of Amazon’s instances use x86 processors, such as Intel Xeon or AMD EPYC. However, following the recent trends in computer architecture, Amazon introduced Arm based instances that promise up to 40% better cost performance ratio than comparable x86 instances for specific workloads. We evaluate in this paper the video encoding performance of x86 and Arm instances of four instance families using the latest FFmpeg version and two video codecs. We examine the impact of the encoding parameters, such as different presets and bitrates, on the time and cost for encoding. Our experiments reveal that Arm instances show high time and cost saving potential of up to 33.63% for specific bitrates and presets, especially for the x264 codec. However, the x86 instances are more general and achieve low encoding times, regardless of the codec.

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Paper accepted in Springer’s Journal of Computing

Title: Handover Authentication Latency Reduction using Mobile Edge Computing and Mobility Patterns

Authors: Fatima Abdullah, Dragi Kimovski, Radu Prodan, and Kashif Munir

Abstract: With the advancement in technology and the exponential growth of mobile devices, network traffic has increased manifold in cellular networks. Due to this reason, latency reduction has become a challenging issue for mobile devices. In order to achieve seamless connectivity and minimal disruption during movement, latency reduction is crucial in the handover authentication process. Handover authentication is a process in which the legitimacy of a mobile node is checked when it crosses the boundary of an access network. This paper proposes an efficient technique that utilizes mobility patterns of the mobile node and mobile Edge computing framework to reduce handover authentication latency. The key idea of the proposed technique is to categorize mobile nodes on the basis of their mobility patterns. We perform simulations to measure the networking latency. Besides, we use queuing model to measure the processing time of an authentication query at an Edge servers. The results show that the proposed approach reduces the handover authentication latency up to 54% in comparison with the existing approach.

Link: https://c3.itec.aau.at/index.php/paper-accepted-elsevier-computing/

Prof. Radu Prodan
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FusionCL: a machine-learning based approach for OpenCL kernel fusion to increase system performance

Authors:Yasir Noman Khalid, Muhammad Aleem, Usman Ahmed, Radu Prodan, Muhammad Arshad Islam & Muhammad Azhar Iqbal

Abstract: Employing general-purpose graphics processing units (GPGPU) with the help of OpenCL has resulted in greatly reducing the execution time of data-parallel applications by taking advantage of the massive available parallelism. However, when a small data size application is executed on GPU there is a wastage of GPU resources as the application cannot fully utilize GPU compute-cores. There is no mechanism to share a GPU between two kernels due to the lack of operating system support on GPU. In this paper, we propose the provision of a GPU sharing mechanism between two kernels that will lead to increasing GPU occupancy, and as a result, reduce execution time of a job pool. However, if a pair of the kernel is competing for the same set of resources (i.e., both applications are compute-intensive or memory-intensive), kernel fusion may also result in a significant increase in execution time of fused kernels. Therefore, it is pertinent to select an optimal pair of kernels for fusion that will result in significant speedup over their serial execution. This research presents FusionCL, a machine learning-based GPU sharing mechanism between a pair of OpenCL kernels. FusionCL identifies each pair of kernels (from the job pool), which are suitable candidates for fusion using a machine learning-based fusion suitability classifier. Thereafter, from all the candidates, it selects a pair of candidate kernels that will produce maximum speedup after fusion over their serial execution using a fusion speedup predictor. The experimental evaluation shows that the proposed kernel fusion mechanism reduces execution time by 2.83× when compared to a baseline scheduling scheme. When compared to state-of-the-art, the reduction in execution time is up to 8%.

Link: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00607-021-00958-2

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This paper won the second best paper award at the CCGrid 2021 conference.

Title: “A Two-Sided Matching Model for Data Stream Processing in the Cloud-Fog Continuum” by: Narges Mehran, Dragi Kimovski and Radu Prodan, was virtually presented in the CCgrid2021 conference.

We at @alpenadriauni are proud of Narges and her work in the @EU_H2020 @DataCloud2020 project awarded at cloudbus.org/ccgrid2021/.

Watch award presentation at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSnzDpd5Kqc

Nishant Saurabh
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Paper accepted in Elsevier’s Journal of Blockchain: Research and Applications

Title: The ARTICONF Approach to Decentralised  Car-sharing 

Authors: Nishant Saurabh (UNI-KLU), Carlos Rubia (Agilia), Anandakumar Palanisamy (BY), Spiros Koulouzis (UvA), Mirsat Sefidanoski (UIST), Antorweep Chakravorty (UiS), Zhiming Zhao (UvA), Aleksandar Karadimce (UIST), Radu Prodan (UNI-KLU)

Abstract: Social media applications are essential for next generation connectivity. Today, social media are centralized platforms with a single proprietary organization controlling the network and posing critical trust and governance issues over the created and propagated content.
The ARTICONF project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 program researches a decentralized social media platform based on a novel set of trustworthy, resilient and globally sustainable tools that address privacy, robustness and autonomy-related promises that proprietary social media platforms have failed to deliver so far. This paper presents the ARTICONF approach to a car-sharing decentralized application (DApp) use case, as a new collaborative peer-to-peer model providing an alternative solution to private car ownership. We describe a prototype implementation of the car-sharing social media DApp and illustrate through real snapshots how the different ARTICONF tools support it in a simulated scenario.

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Presentation accepted for ASHPC’21

The presentation has been accepted to the main-track of the Austrian-Slovenian HPC Meeting (ASHPC’21). Meeting will be organized in a hybrid format on 31 May – 2 June, 2021 at the Institute of Information Science in Maribor, Slovenia.

Title: Automated Workflows Scheduling via Two-Phase Event-based MILP Heuristic for MRCPSP Problem

Authors: Vladislav Kashansky, Gleb Radchenko, Radu Prodan, Anatoliy Zabrovskiy and Prateek Agrawal

Abstract: In today’s reality massive amounts of data-intensive tasks are managed by utilizing a large number of heterogeneous computing and storage elements interconnected through high-speed communication networks. However, one issue that still requires research effort is to enable effcient workflows scheduling in such complex environments.
As the scale of the system grows and the workloads become more heterogeneous in the inner structure and the arrival patterns, scheduling problem becomes exponentially harder, requiring problem-specifc heuristics. Many techniques evolved to tackle this problem, including, but not limited to Heterogeneous Earliest Finish Time (HEFT), The Dynamic Scaling Consolidation Scheduling (DSCS), Partitioned Balanced Time Scheduling (PBTS), Deadline Constrained Critical Path (DCCP) and Partition Problem-based Dynamic Provisioning Scheduling (PPDPS). In this talk, we will discuss the two-phase heuristic for makespan-optimized assignment of tasks and computing machines on large-scale computing systems, consisting of matching phase with subsequent event-based MILP method for schedule generation. We evaluated the scalability of the heuristic using the Constraint Integer Programing (SCIP) solver with various configurations based on data sets, provided by the MACS framework. Preliminary results show that the model provides near-optimal assignments and schedules for workflows composed of up to 100 tasks with complex task I/O interactions and demonstrates variable sensitivity with respect to the scale of workflows and resource limitation policies imposed.

Keywords: HPC Schedule Generation, MRCPSP Problem, Workflows Scheduling, Two-Phase Heuristic

Acknowledgement: This work has received funding from the EC-funded project H2020 FETHPC ASPIDE (Agreement #801091)

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ADAPT: online kickoff meeting

ADAPT started with the online Kickoff meeting, coordinated by Prof. Radu Prodan.

Prof. Radu Prodan
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Nomination as MC Member at COST

Prof. Radu Prodan has been nominated as Management Committee (MC) Member CA19135 at COST (European Cooperation in Science & Technologie).

Prof. Radu Prodan
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Paper accepted in RCIS 2021

Conference: 15th International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science

Title : DataCloud: Enabling the Big Data Pipelines on the Computing Continuum

Authors: Dumitru Roman, Nikolay Nikolov, Brian Elvesæter, Ahmet Soylu, Radu Prodan, Dragi Kimovski, Andrea Marrella, Francesco Leotta, Dario Benvenuti, Mihhail Matskin, Giannis Ledakis, Anthony Simonet-Boulogne, Fernando Perales, Evgeny Kharlamov, Alexandre Ulisses, Arnor Solberg and Raffaele Ceccarelli