Platform For Distributed Systems Research Articles

Execution Time Reduction in Function Oriented Scientific Workflows

Scientific workflows have been an increasingly important research area of distributed systems (such as cloud computing). Researchers have shown an increased interest in the automated processing scientific applications such as workflows. Recently, Function as a Service (FaaS) has emerged as a novel distributed systems platform for processing non-interactive applications. FaaS has limitations in resource use (e.g., CPU and RAM) as well as state management. In spite of these, initial studies have already demonstrated using FaaS for processing scientific workflows. DEWE v3 executes workflows in this fashion, but it often suffers from duplicate data transfers while using FaaS. This behaviour is due to the handling of intermediate data dependencies after and before each function invocation. These data dependencies could fill the temporary storage of the function environment. Our approach alters the job dispatch algorithm of DEWE v3 to reduce data dependency transfers. The proposed algorithm schedules jobs with precedence requirements to primarily run in the same function invocation. We evaluate our proposed algorithm and the original algorithm with small- and large-scale Montage workflows. Our results show that the improved system can reduce the total workflow execution time of scientific workflows over DEWE v3 by about 10\% when using AWS Lambda.

Design and Implementation of Distributed System Platform Based on Chaos Theory and Encryption Algorithm

Design and Implementation of Distributed System Platform Based on Chaos Theory and Encryption Algorithm

Campus Distributed System Platform Considering Support Vector Machine Algorithm

Campus Distributed System Platform Considering Support Vector Machine Algorithm

Fault Tolerance Mechanism of a Distributed System for Marine Communication Network

Sun, J., 2020. Fault tolerance mechanism of distributed system for marine communication network. In: Gong, D.; Zhang, M., and Liu, R. (eds.), Advances in Coastal Research: Engineering, Industry, Economy, and Sustainable Development. Journal of Coastal Research, Special Issue No. 106, pp. 605–608. Coconut Creek (Florida), ISSN 0749-0208.When the communication network fails or the signal is interrupted, the distributed fault-tolerant system can continue to complete the communication task, which is needed to improve the fault-tolerant performance of the distributed system. Therefore, the key technologies of fault tolerance need to be studied, including the distributed fault-tolerant communication network simulation platform, the communication-network information-storage data structure, the communication protocol between communication network nodes, and the fault-tolerant algorithm of distributed communication network system. In the marine environment, the fleet exchanges data through wireless networks to understand the situation of the fleet-detection area, which can share the processing and calculation tasks. However, the marine environment is complex and changeable, which can cause great interference to the wireless signal, such as sea and cloud-rain clutter. These marine environments will cause the network communication signals to be greatly disturbed, which makes the distributed system unable to guarantee the communication interconnection between each node at any time. Therefore, a data-sharing and distributed-system platform needs to be built, which will design a reasonable system fault-tolerance mechanism. Through the fault-tolerance mechanism of the communication network system, the problem of frequent-node exits can be solved. By optimizing the fault-tolerant strategy of distributed architecture, the system's disaster resistance can be improved. In this research, a fault-tolerance mechanism for a distributed system was designed, which is more suitable for node election.

QoS Enhancement In VoD Systems: Load Management And Replication Policy Optimization Perspectives

AbstractThe amount of online video content is exponentially increasing, which spurs its access demands. Providing optimal quality of service (QoS) for this ever-increasing video data is a challenging task due to the number of QoS constraints. The system resources, the distributed system platform and the transport protocol thus all need to collaborate to guarantee an acceptable level of QoS for the optimal video streaming process. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey on QoS management for the video-on-demand systems. First, we focus on load management and replication algorithms in content delivery networks and peer-to-peer (P2P) networks for their shortcomings. We also address the problem of admission control and resource allocation with the objectives of congestion avoidance and frame-loss reduction. Besides, we introduce and discuss various replication schemes. For both the client–server architecture and P2P networks, we highlight the need for a specific storage management policy to preserve system reliability and content availability. We also focus on content distribution and streaming protocols scaling. We deduce that content availability is linked to the characteristics and the performance of the streaming protocols. Finally, we create a comparison table that presents the different contributions of the discussed approaches as well as their limitations. We believe that such a comprehensive survey provides useful insights and contributes to the related domains.

SmartLVGrid Platform—Convergence of Legacy Low-Voltage Circuits toward the Smart Grid Paradigm

The current electrical system is transitioning towards a new technological model called the smart grid. The transition duration between the traditional Electric Power System (EPS) and the full smart grid depends on well-designed strategic plans, implementing transition models that are as close to smart grids as possible, based on the processes and technological resources available at the time, but always considering their economic feasibility, without which no solution thrives. In this article, we present a method for convergence of the traditional power distribution grid to the smart grid paradigm by retrofitting the legacy circuits that compose this grid. Our results indicate that the application of such a method, through a distributed system platform with integrated technological resources added to the legacy infrastructure, converts these passive grids into intelligent circuits capable of supporting the implementation of a smart grid with a broad scope of functionalities. Based on a novel retrofitting strategy, the solution is free from the cost of replacing or significantly modifying the legacy infrastructure, as verified in deploying other currently available solutions.

Flexibility Is Key in New York: New Tools and Operational Solutions for Managing Distributed Energy Resources

New York State is pioneering a new approach to regulating its electric utility companies that is expected to usher in the distributed energy system of tomorrow. Among the goals of the New York REV (Reforming the Energy Vision) proceeding launched in 2015 are a 40% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels and a mandate for 50% of the state's electricity to be generated from renewable resources by 2030. In 2014, 25% of New York's electric generation was produced by renewables, of which 80% was from hydropower. In addition to these and other objectives, the New York Public Service Commission has identified the need to establish a distributed system platform provider (DSPP), which will facilitate new markets to accelerate adoption and realize the value of distributed energy resources (DERs). To do this, the incumbent utilities will perform the role of the DSPP and create and operate the distributed system platform (DSP). Building the DSP is a big task, and each of the New York utilities is in the process of deploying it according to their distribution system implementation plans (DSIPs).

Design of Can Bus Clock Synchronous System Based on STM32

IEEE1588 Precision Clock Protocol is applied to Can Bus distributed system platform constructed of STM 32 chips to accomplish the clock synchronous system between primary and subsidiary base stations, thus ensuring the clock synchronization with the precision of millisecond.

TOWARDS ENERGY AWARE RESERVATION INFRASTRUCTURE FOR LARGE-SCALE EXPERIMENTAL DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS

While an extensive set of research projects deal with the issue of power-saving for battery-based electronic devices, few have an interest in permanently-plugged Large-Scale Experimental Distributed Systems (LSEDS). However, a rapid study shows that each computer, member of a distributed system platform, consumes a substantial quantity of power, especially when those resources are idle. Today, given the number of processing resources involved in large-scale computing infrastructures, we are convinced that we can save a lot of electric power by proposing and applying "green policies". Introduced in this article, those policies propose to alternatively switch computer nodes On and Off in a clever way. Based on the analysis of some experimental large-scale system's usage, we propose a resource-reservation infrastructure which takes the energy issue into account. We validate our infrastructure on the large-scale experimental Grid'5000a platform and present the energy gains obtained.

Performance Simulation of a Dependable Distributed System

The aim of our research is to develop a distributed system platform that supports a variety of tasks. Currently, we are implementing Internet applica tions on the system, including a service redirector, firewall, and web applications. These applications have different levels of dependability requirements. Depending on their criticality, a single task may execute on one or more computer nodes. Software-implemented fault-tolerant proto cols are used to detect the disagreement among replicas. A reconfiguration protocol is used to identify faulty nodes according to the fault reports from other fault-tolerant protocols and to reallo cate their tasks to other working nodes. As a part of the project, this work focuses on the implemen tation and simulation of the system and the firewall application. Data transfer throughput of the system is measured and analyzed. The results are being used in supporting our development of the overall system.

Selected papers from Middleware'98: The IFIP International Conference on Distributed Systems Platforms and Open Distributed Processing

In recent years the distributed systems community has witnessed a growth in the number of conferences, leading to difficulties in tracking the literature and a consequent loss of awareness of work done by others in this important research domain. In an attempt to synthesize many of the smaller workshops and conferences in the field, and to bring together research communities which were becoming fragmented, IFIP staged Middleware'98: The IFIP International Conference on Distributed Systems Platforms and Open Distributed Processing. The conference was widely publicized and attracted over 150 technical submissions including 135 full paper submissions. The final programme consisted of 28 papers, giving an acceptance ratio of a little over one in five. More crucially, the programme accurately reflected the state of the art in middleware research, addressing issues such as ORB architectures, engineering of large-scale systems and multimedia. The traditional role of middleware as a point of integration and service provision was clearly intact, but the programme stressed the importance of emerging `must-have' features such as support for extensibility, mobility and quality of service. The Middleware'98 conference was held in the Lake District, UK in September 1998. Over 160 delegates made the journey to one of the UK's most beautiful regions and contributed to a lively series of presentations and debates. A permanent record of the conference, including transcripts of the panel discussions which took place, is available at: http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/middleware98/ Based on their original reviews and the reactions of delegates to the ensuing presentations we have selected six papers from the conference for publication in this special issue of Distributed Systems Engineering. The first paper, entitled `Jonathan: an open distributed processing environment in Java', by Dumant et al describes a minimal, modular ORB framework which can be used for supporting real-time and multimedia applications. The framework provides mechanisms by which services such as CORBA ORBs can be constructed as personalities which exploit the services provided by the underlying minimal kernel. The issue of engineering ORBs is taken further in the second paper, `The implementation of a high-performance ORB over multiple network transports' by Lo and Pope. This paper is of particular interest since it presents the concrete results of running a modern ORB, i.e. omniORB2, over a range of transport mechanisms, including TCP/IP, shared memory and ATM AAL5. However, in order for middleware to progress, future platforms must tackle the issue of scalability as well as that of performance. For this reason we have included two papers, `Systems support for scalable and fault tolerant Internet services' by Chawathe and Brewer and `A scalable middleware solution for advanced wide-area Web services' by van Steen et al, which address the problems inherent in developing scalable middleware. Although the two papers focus on different problems in this area, they are both motivated by the explosion of services and information made available through the World Wide Web. Indeed, the role of the World Wide Web as a component in middleware platforms featured prominently in the conference and this is reflected in our choice of the paper by Cao et al entitled `Active Cache: caching dynamic contents on the Web'. Motivated once again by the problems of scalability, Cao et al propose a system to support the caching of dynamic documents. This is achieved by enabling small applets to be cached along with pages and run by the cache servers. The issues of security, trust and resource utilization raised by such a system are explored in detail by the authors. Finally, `Mobile Java objects' by Hayton et al considers these issues still further as part of the authors' work on adding object mobility to Java. Together, the six papers contained within this issue of Distributed Systems Engineering capture the essence of Middleware'98 and demonstrate the progress that has been made in the field. Of particular note is the systems-oriented focus of these papers: the field has clearly matured beyond modelling and into the domain of advanced systems development. We hope that the papers contained here stimulate and inform you and we look forward to meeting you at a future Middleware conference.

A survey of QoS architectures

Over the past several years there has been a considerable amount of research within the field of quality-of-service (QoS) support for distributed multimedia systems. To date, most of the work has been within the context of individual architectural layers such as the distributed system platform, operating system, transport subsystem and network layers. Much less progress has been made in addressing the issue of overall end-to-end support for multimedia communications. In recognition of this, a number of research teams have proposed the development of QoS architectures which incorporate QoS-configurable interfaces and QoS driven control and management mechanisms across all architectural layers. This paper examines the state-of-the-art in the development of QoS architectures. The approach taken is to present QoS terminology and a generalized QoS framework for understanding and discussing QoS in the context of distributed multimedia systems. Following this, we evaluate a number of QoS architectures that have emerged in the literature.

L 2 imbo: a distributed systems platform for mobile computing

Mobile computing environments increasingly consist of a range of supporting technologies offering a diverse set of capabilities to applications and end-systems. Such environments are characterised by sudden and dramatic changes in the quality-of-service (QoS) available to applications and users. Recent work has shown that distributed systems platforms can assist applications to take advantage of these changes in QoS and, more specifically, facilitate applications to adapt to their environment. However, the current state-of-the-art in these platforms reflects their fixed network origins through their choice of synchronous connection-oriented communications paradigms. In this paper we argue that these paradigms are not well suited to operation in the emerging mobile environments. Furthermore, we offer an alternative programming paradigm based on tuple spaces which, we believe, offers a number of benefits within a mobile context. The paper presents the design, implementation and evaluation of a new platform based on this paradigm.

Using mobile agents to support interorganizational workflow management

This article argues that the mobile agent approach is well suited for sporadic communication in open distributed systems, especially for rather ''loose'' cooperations across local and organizational boundaries. In an increasing number of cases, management of distributed business procedures reaches beyond such boundaries. This means, for most existing workflow management systems, that cooperating partners are required to give up their local autonomy. However, for cases in which business partners intend to cooperate but still need to preserve their local autonomy, process participation on the basis of mobile agents represents an appropriate mechanism. This article shows how such process integration can be achieved. It also demonstrates how the Common Open Service Market (COSM) system software can be extended in order to use petri-net based process definitions that realize mobile agents in an integrated distributed system platform.

A review of distributed architectures for networked virtual reality

The aims of this paper are twofold. First, it identifies the general requirements of future large-scale distributed virtual reality (VR) systems based on an analysis of current VR systems, of more general distributed systems platforms and a consideration of the key issues of scale and heterogeneity. These requirements subsequently inform the development of a general VR reference architecture; and a framework which identifies the key software components which will comprise future distributed VR systems. Second, it uses this reference architecture as a vehicle for conducting a broad review of current distributed VR products and research prototypes. The review covers twelve well known VR systems and intended as a general resource for researchers entering the field. These systems are: AVIARY, BrickNet, DIVE, dVS, MASSIVE, the MR Toolkit, NPSNET, Superscape, VEOS, VUE, WAVES and World Toolkit. The review also identifies relevant standards in the areas of computer graphics and distributed systems. The paper finishes by drawing out a number of more general conclusions from the review including the urgent need to conduct research into the subjects of security and resource discovery for distributed VR systems.