Carla S. Ellis - US grants

Nonuniformity of memory access is an almost inevitable feature of the memory architecture in shared memory designs that can scale to large numbers of processors, creating the increasingly important class of NUMA (nonuniform memory access time) multiprocessors. Managing the placement and movement of code and data is crucial to performance in NUMA architectures. This has been called the NUMA Problem. The I/O bottleneck problem is also exacerbated by parallel architectures which widen the gap between processing speed and disk speed even beyond that created by improved processor technology. This project investigates operating system mechanisms and policies for the management of the various levels of shared storage in such large- scale shared memory multiprocessors. The specific projects divide into the following classes: main memory management (both traditional virtual memory and the migration and replication of pages among various main memory modules), parallel file system design, workload characterization and performance evaluation methodology and the role of the programming environment in solving the NUMA Problem.

The study of operating system mechanisms and policies for the management of various levels of shared storage in tightly-coupled MIMD machines is at an early stage. This is even more true for the case of large-scale machines with hundreds of processors. This project will continue a multiyear investigation of these issues in the large-scale case with a focus on the Butterfly multiprocessor. Specific projects divide into the following classes: workload characterization, shared data migration across parallel main memories, management of virtual memory in a setting of multiple secondary memories each associated with a main memory, and file system design.

This proposal supports the acquisition of a parallel computer capable of operating in both Single Instruction, Multiple Data mode and Multiple Instruction, Multiple Data mode. The computer will be used to support research in operating systems, scientific computing, parallel algorithms, VLSI design, and logic programming. Collaborations with other departments, particularly with computational physics and chemistry, will also be enabled by the acquisition of this computer.

9512356 Vitter Duke University proposes the establishment of an ATM-based network cluster of high-performance 64-bit workstations for supporting collaborative research and applications. Three fundamental systems performance concerns are considered for supporting a wide mix of workloads and applications of these collaborative activities: locality management, resource conflicts, and resource reduction. Seven specific projects have been identified: (1) toolkits and interfaces for explicit control of disk resources, (2) parallel file system, (3) virtual memory support for memory-intensive computations, (4) distributed shared memory, (5) cluster virtual storage, (6) data compression, and (7) predication for locality management. The workstation cluster instrumentation is necessary to perform state-of-the-art experimental research on methods to make the cluster viable for next-generation collaborative computing. The proposed cluster testbed is indispensable for conducting the research. The instrumentation is both the vehicle for and the subject of research. ***

This grant provides travel funds for about 40 US students from different institutions to attend ACM's 16th SIGOPS Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, to be held in France in October 1997. This symposium is being held for the first time outside of US. This symposium is well recognized as the premier conference for the leading-edge research in the field. In the past it has been attended by a large number of US students, as it has served in broadening the experience of promising young researchers and enriching their careers. The students will be selected through an open competition based on their research performance, potential to enrich the symposium, and diversity considerations.***

9720545 Ellis, Carla Schlatter Duke University POWRE: Visiting Professorship: Systems Research in Adaptation This project supports the research and educational activities of the PI as a Visiting Professor at the University of Washington for the 1997-98 academic year. The research investigates the role of adaptation in computer systems, particularly as it applies to resource management in clusters of workstations and environments for mobile computing. Adaptation is an emerging theme in systems research. At all levels of system design, there are potential performance benefits to be realized by responding to dynamic variations in runtime behavior and resource availability by applying distinctly different policies or techniques. The defined research plan experimentally addresses questions concerning what the best adaptation strategies are and what infrastructure mechanisms are useful for their implementation. The methods to be employed include design, implementation, and measurement of software prototypes to evaluate various adaptation approaches. This award is expected to have impact on the discovery of new adaptation techniques to improve mobile and cluster computing performance, encouragement of women students to enter and to complete advanced degree programs in Computer Science, and advancement the PI as a senior woman in research and education.

The goal of this project is to develop an integrated
hardware/software infrastructure to support power management for
battery-powered mobile and wireless applications. These future
environments will support applications with demanding requirements
such as disaster recovery. Energy conservation, especially for
mobile and embedded devices, promises to have significant economic,
environmental, and societal impacts.

The activities focus on three key directions: i) the development of
power measurement tools, workloads, and experimental methods to
evaluate energy consumption, ii) the energy-aware APIs to allow
application-directed power management, and iii) the development of
system support for high-level solutions.

These research projects all rely on experimental techniques for
evaluating ideas. Making empirical measurements and observations on
device and workload characteristics pinpoints the problem areas of
greatest potential. Initially formulating simulation models narrows
the solution space and allows consideration of new architectures.
Finally, constructing working prototypes allows observation of all
activity associated with real operating environments and offers
deeper insights into their behavior. The popularity and
accessibility of the palmtop and handheld platforms gives this
research significant potential for immediate technology transfer.

0088078
Astrachan, Owen L.
Duke University

CRCD: Modules and Courses for Ubiquitous and Mobile Computing

This project educates students in the techniques and technologies required to deploy next generation wireless information systems. Courses developed for this project focus on ubiquitous and wireless computing. And, these same technologies are used in classrooms to deliver the curriculum as a part of the project that supports "active learning." The areas of research chosen for migration into the curriculum include mobile code (placement and migration of code to adapt to rapidly changing clients, networks, and service characteristics), transcoding (transforming multimedia web content to save bandwidth and thus energy consumption at the destination device), active name architectures (where resource names are decoupled from specific hosts when resolving services), and energy aware operating systems (where the goal is to make basic interactions of hardware and software as energy efficient as possible for local computation). The project migrates research topics into advanced undergraduate courses and graduate courses, developing modules, assignments, software and curricular support that engage and educate students in the technologies of mobile and wireless information systems. The materials developed are integrated into five computer science courses. The courses apply active lectures, a form of active learning, to deliver content.

EIA-9986024
Carla Ellis
Duke University

CISE Research Instrumentation: System Support for Mobile and Embedded Workloads

This proposal seeks funding to deploy a wireless infrastructure in the Computer Science Department at Duke University.

The requested infrastructure will be used as a testbed for our research. The individual research results will be combined to provide a coherent system for the deployment of mobile and embedded applications. A goal of this research is to evaluate the success of the individual system components by demonstrating the viability of the disaster recovery application, in effect approximating next generation environments using currently available technology. In addition to these research results, the requested infrastructure will aid the department's continuing efforts into education and outreach. The equipment will serve as the basis of a project-oriented course to develop applications and system support for the infrastructure and will also serve as the basis for summer internship projects in Duke's continuing outreach efforts to underrepresented groups.

Energy is becoming the limiting resource for many applications, as processor performance and network bandwidth continue to rapidly advance. Devices such as wireless sensor networks, cell phones with integrated personal organizers (PDAs), laptops, and even Internet hosting centers are all concerned about power consumption either due to limited battery capacity or the high cost of operating and cooling large server farms. In many of these systems main memory can become a significant portion of the overall power budget, particularly with the advent of low-power, high-performance processors.

This project investigates main memory power management research issues that span several levels of computer system design: from the operating system managing memory power states, to the design characteristics of platform architectures, and finally down to the details of internal DRAM organization.
This project will investigate power management design decisions within each system level and explore interactions across levels.

Managing the energy consumption of computers requires cooperation
between energy aware applications and operating systems. This
research seeks to fully explore the energy management space
surrounding the interaction of applications and the operating system.
Applications should adjust their energy consumption when appropriate,
but must be provided accurate information on their individual energy
consumption. The operating system must implement the mechanisms and
policies to determine energy consumption and allocate it fairly as a
global system resource.

This research will first re-examine operating system structure with an
emphasis on managing energy as a first class resource. Energy
management cuts across all traditional system resources, with the CPU,
disk, network, and memory all exhibiting unique energy consumption
characteristics. Next, the work will explore policies for allocating
energy to competing tasks. The goal is to maintain fairness while
observing user-specified priorities and soft real-time deadlines.

The end product of this research will be a comprehensive framework for
globally managing energy in a diverse set of scenarios, ranging from a
single mobile computer, to wireless sensor networks that may have
aggregate goals across a large number of sensors, to hosting centers
that wish to provide maximum performance with minimum energy
consumption.

The next generation of wireless sensor networks will be dynamic systems with the potential to
revolutionize understanding of environmental change, provided they can assimilate large amounts of heterogeneous data in real time, rapidly assess (optimize) the relative value and costs of new data collection, and schedule subsequent measurements accordingly. Thus, they are Dynamic Data Driven Application Systems that integrate sensing with modeling in an adaptive framework. Keen interest in broad application of wireless sensing of the environment, as in NEON and CLEANER, awaits DDDAS technology that can estimate the value of future data in terms of its contribution to understanding against the costs of deployment, acquisition, transmission, and storage. This balance is especially important for environmental data, because networks will typically be deployed in remote locations without access to infrastructure (e.g., power), and sampling intervals will range from meters and seconds to landscapes and years, depending on the process, the current state of the system, the uncertainty about that state, and the perceived potential for rapid change. Network control must be dynamic and driven by models capable of
learning about both the environment and the network. The focus of this project is the dynamic sensor network application involving understanding how biodiversity and carbon storage are influenced by global change. Specifically, this project is designed to learn how the growth, survival, and reproduction of forest trees are influenced by changes in climate, CO2 and disturbance, in the context of these and other variables that can fluctuate rapidly. This goal involves models of how tree growth and resource allocation are influenced by variables that can be understood through adaptive sampling across diverse scales in both time and space. The project will enable a general framework for dynamic data-driven wireless network control that combines environmental modeling and sensor network modeling both in and out of the network. Out of the network, environmental modeling entails full assimilation of all information, with exploitation of computing resources available there. Environmental modeling in the network is based on simplified representations that provide real-time, approximate answers. The in-network control model provides rapid scheduling for new measurements, and it communicates network information to the server, for diagnostics, supervisory control, and data assimilation. Periodically, the in-network model is updated
based on this most complete understanding of the environmental variables, parameters, and battery life. Specific goals are (i) to construct a wireless sensing and networking infrastructure that supports a new paradigm of joint in-network and supervisory measurement, modeling, and prediction, (ii) to develop the modeling strategy needed to combine system understanding with costs for efficient wireless sensing of the environment, (iii) to make significant progress in understanding the maintenance of biodiversity and in measuring ecosystem properties, and (iv) to improve collaboration between computer sciences, engineering, statisticians and environmental scientists.

This award provides NSF support for student travel for a workshop, specifically for women, to be held in conjunction with the 21st ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP 2007) will be held at Skamania Lodge in Stevenson, WA, October 14 - 17, 2007.

SOSP has been the premier forum for operating systems research. Held every two years, and accepting only 20-25 papers, the conference is highly selective. The SOSP meeting occurs every two years, focused on theories, principles, and practice in operating systems research. The Systers electronic community was formed at the 1987 SOSP. Participation by women has not increased in the interim. In recognition of this anniversary and addressing the continuing need to encourage greater diversity in the discipline, this workshop for women graduate and undergraduate students is held prior to the conference. The workshop is designed as a community building event, serving both to educate more women about the opportunities in systems research and to support women who have started working in the field.