No description available.

Stuttgart, Univ., Diplomarb., 2004.

Client devices operating at the edges on the Internet, in homes, cars, offices, and elsewhere, are highly heterogeneous in terms of their hardware configurations, form factors, and capabilities, ranging from small sensors to wearable and mobile devices, to the stationary ones like smart TVs and desktop machines. With recent and future advances in wireless networking allowing all such devices to interact with each other and with the cloud, it becomes possible to combine and augment capabilities of individual devices via services running at the edge - in edge clouds - and/or via services running in remote datacenters. The virtual platform approach to combining and enhancing such devices developed in this research makes possible the creation of innovative end user services, using low-latency communications with nearby devices to create for each end user exactly the platform needed for current tasks, guided by permissions and policies controlled by remote, cloud-resident social network services (SNS). To end users, virtual platforms operate beyond the limitations of individual devices, as natural extensions of those devices that offer improved functionality and performance, with ease-of-use provided by cloud-level global context and knowledge.

Berlin, Techn. Univ., Diss., 2009.

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the effectiveness of executing High Performance Computing (HPC) workloads on multiprocessors with heterogeneous Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) cores. ISA-heterogeneity in processor designs provides a unique dimension for researchers to explore performance benefits through diversity in design choices. Additionally, each application has a natural preference to one processor in a selected group of processors (we defined this term as processor-preference), and processor-preference is highly affected by processor design choices. Thus, a system with heterogeneous-ISA cores offers an intriguing design perspective, packing heterogeneous-ISA cores in the same processor or system that compensate each other in dynamic workload scenarios. This thesis considers dynamic migrating applications with different processor-preferences across ISA-different cores to exploit the potential of this idea. With SIMD instructions getting more attention from chip designers, this thesis also presents the necessary modifications for a general compiler/run-time infrastructure to transform the dynamic program state of SIMD regions at run-time from one ISA format to another for cross-ISA migration and execution. Lastly, this thesis presents a processor-preference-aware scheduling policy that makes dynamic cross-ISA migration decisions that improve overall system throughput compared to homogeneous-ISA systems. This thesis prototypes a heterogeneous-ISA system using an Intel Xeon Gold 5118 x86-64 server and a Cavium ThunderX ARMv8 server and evaluates the effectiveness of our infrastructure and scheduling policy. Our results reveal that heterogeneous-ISA systems that are processor-preference-aware and with cross-ISA execution migration capability can yield throughput gains up to 36\% compared to traditional homogeneous ISA systems. / Master of Science / The author of this thesis has a family full of non-engineers. To persuade family members that the work of this thesis is meaningful, aka the author is not procrastinating in school, the author decided to draw an analogy between processors and cars. Suppose in an alternative universe, cars (systems) can be powered by engines (processors) that uses two different fuel-sources (ISAs): gasoline or electric (single-ISA) processors but not both (heterogeneous-ISA). Car manufacturers (chip designers) can build engines with different design choices (processors with varying design options): engines combined with turbochargers for gasoline-powered cars, high-performance batteries combined with energy-efficient batteries for electric-powered cars (added extended instruction sets, CPU designs that target vastly different use cases, etc.). However, each design choice is limited to improving performance for a specific type of fuel-source based engine. For example, having battery alternatives has no performance impact on gasoline-powered engines. As time passes by, car manufacturers have exhausted options to make a drastic improvement to their existing engine designs (limited performance gains in recent chips). To tackle this problem, in this thesis, the author first examined the usage of cars: driving on the road (running applications). The author's study found that no single engine is suitable for all routes (no single processor is good for all workloads), and cars powered by different fuel-source based engines showed a significant diversity in performance (application performance varies drastically between systems with processors built on different ISAs). Gasoline-powered cars perform well on high-speed roads, whereas electric-powered cars perform well on low-speed roads. Unfortunately, in real life, a person's commute (a workload of applications) consists of a mixture of high-speed roads and low-speed roads, and one cannot know the exact percentage of each kind of path they travel (exact application composition in a workload) beforehand. Therefore it is challenging for a person to make the correct car selection for the incoming commute (choose the right system for a workload). This thesis tries to solve this commuting problem by building a car that has multiple engines fitted to suit different road needs (systems with processors that have vastly different use cases). This thesis looks at a particular dimension of combining various fuel-powered engines in the same car (a system with heterogeneous-ISA processors). The author believes that adding diversity in fuel-powered engine selections provide an exciting dimension in car design choices (adding ISA-heterogeneity in processors provide a unique dimension in system design). Thus, this thesis focuses on estimating a theoretical multi fuel-powered car's performance by combining two different fuel-powered cars into a single mega-car using some framework (Popcorn Linux). This framework allows this mega-car to be driven by a combined fuel source with fuel intake freely transfer between fuel-sources (cross-ISA migration and execution) based on road conditions (application encountered). Based on the evaluation of this new prototype, the author finds that in a real-life scenario (workload with mixed application combination), cars with multiple fuel-source based engines have better performance than two single fuel-source based cars (systems with heterogeneous-ISAs processors perform better than systems with homogeneous-ISAs processors). The author hopes that this study can help build the foundation for the development of hybrid cars (system with heterogeneous-ISAs in the same processor) in the future as well as the consideration of modifying existing car into a mega-car with multiple engines suited for different road needs for improved commute performance for now. Ultimately, this thesis is not about cars. The author hopes that by explaining the research done in this paper through cars, general audiences can understand what this work is trying to investigate and what solution they have provided. In this work, we investigate the potential of a system with heterogeneous-ISA processors. This thesis prototypes one such system and finds that heterogeneous-ISA systems have performance benefits than traditional homogeneous-ISA systems over a series of experiment evaluations.

Enterprises can be empowered to live up to the potential of becoming dynamic, agile and real-time. Service orientation is emerging from the amalgamation of a number of key business, technology and cultural developments. Three essential trends in particular are coming together to create a new revolutionary breed of enterprise, the service-oriented enterprise (SOE): (1) the continuous performance management of the enterprise; (2) the emergence of business process management; and (3) advances in the standards-based service-oriented infrastructures. This thesis focuses on this emerging three-layered architecture that builds on a service-oriented architecture framework, with a process layer that brings technology and business together, and a corporate performance layer that continually monitors and improves the performance indicators of global enterprises provides a novel framework for the business context in which to apply the important technical idea of service orientation and moves it from being an interesting tool for engineers to a vehicle for business managers to fundamentally improve their businesses.

Variations between the software environments(e.g., installed applications, versions of libraries) on different high-performance computing (HPC) systems lead to a heterogeneity problem. Therefore, we design an optimized, homogeneous virtual machine (VM) called a virtual application appliance (VAA). Scientists can package scientific applications, and all supporting software components, as VAAs and run them independently from the underlying heterogeneous HPC systems. However, securely moving data in and out of the VAA and controlling the execution of applications are not trivial for a non-computer scientist. Consequently, we develop two automated stage-in/stage-out secure data movement mechanisms. We also explore a migration mechanism to further simplify the control of the VAA execution. Empirical evaluation results show that VAAs achieve near-native performance in widely used bioinformatics applications that we tested. Data movement, VM boot up, shutdown and migration overheads of VAAs are negligible with respect to total run-times.

No description available.

The Nordin group at Brigham Young University has been focused on developing 3D printing technology for fabrication of lab-on-a-chip (microfluidic) devices since 2013. As we showed in 2015, commercial 3D printers and resins have not been developed to meet the highly specialized needs of microfluidic device fabrication. We have therefore created custom 3D printers and resins specifically designed to meet these needs. As part of this development process, ad hoc 3D printer control software has been developed. However, the software is difficult to modify and maintain to support the numerous experimental iterations of hardware used in our custom 3D printers. This highlights the need for modular yet reliable system software that is easy to use, learn, and work with to adapt to the unique challenges of a student workforce. This thesis details the design and implementation of new 3D printer system software that meets these needs. In particular, a software engineering principle-based design approach is taken that lends itself to several specific development patterns that permit easy incorporation of new hardware into a 3D printer to enable rapid evaluation of and development with such new hardware.

Modern computer hardware platforms are moving towards high core-count and heterogeneous Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) processors to achieve improved performance as single core performance has reached its performance limit. These trends put the current monolithic SMP operating system (OS) under scrutiny in terms of scalability and portability. Proper pairing of computing workloads with computing resources has become increasingly arduous with traditional software architecture. One of the most promising emerging operating system architectures is the Multi-kernel. Multi-kernels not only address scalability issues, but also inherently support heterogeneity. Furthermore, provide an easy way to properly map computing workloads to the correct type of processing resources in presence of heterogeneity. Multi-kernels do so by partitioning the resources and running independent kernel instances and co-operating amongst themselves to present a unified view of the system to the application. Popcorn is one the most prominent multi-kernels today, which is unique in the sense that it runs multiple Linux instances on different cores or group of cores, and provides a unified view of the system i.e., Single System Image (SSI). This thesis presents four contributions. First, it introduces a filesystem for Popcorn, which is a vital part to provide a SSI. Popcorn supports thread/process migration that requires migration of file descriptors which is not provided by traditional filesystems as well as popular distributed file systems, this work proposes a scalable messaging based file descriptor migration and consistency protocol for Popcorn. Second, multi-kernel OSs rely heavily on a fast low latency messaging layer to be scalable. Messaging is even more important in heterogeneous systems where different types of cores are on different islands with no shared memory. Thus, another contribution proposes a fast-low latency messaging layer to enable communication among heterogeneous processor islands for Heterogeneous Popcorn. With advances in networking technology, newest Ethernet technologies are able to support up to 40 Gbps bandwidth, but due to scalability issues in monolithic kernels, the number of connections served per second does not scale with this increase in speed.Therefore, the third and fourth contributions try to address this problem with Snap Bean, a virtual network device and Angel, an opportunistic load balancer for Popcorn's network system. With the messaging layer Popcorn gets over 30% performance benefit over OpenCL and Intel Offloading technique (LEO). And with NetPopcorn we achieve over 7 to 8 times better performance over vanilla Linux and 2 to 5 times over state-of-the-art Affinity Accept. / Master of Science