Lightweight Runtime Environment Research Articles

ROBxTASK RTE - a lightweight runtime environment to implement collaborative processes across different robotic systems

In the research project ROBxTASK a platform is being developed that allows users to define robotic workflows using the visual programming language Google Blockly. Users can create custom agent code to call the skills of the robotic systems, send/receive messages between agents and thus orchestrate workflows for multiple agents.To meet these requirements, a simple runtime environment (RTE) is developed in Python to enable the integration of various robot infrastructures into an overall architecture. This RTE provides communication between agents, simple service discovery and dispatching, testability without hardware, logging and monitoring of processes, and requires only an MQTT broker as minimal infrastructure. Using an industrial part delivery use case, we show how this simple RTE can be used to develop autonomous, self-mediated, collaborative robotic workflows, as well as to integrate human operators into decision-making processes.

Diminishing Returns and Deep Learning for Adaptive CPU Resource Allocation of Containers

Containers provide a lightweight runtime environment for microservices applications while enabling better server utilization. Automatic optimal allocation of CPU pins to the containers serving specific workloads can help to minimize the completion time of jobs. Most of the existing state-of-the-art focused on building new efficient scheduling algorithms for placing the containers on the infrastructure, and the resources to the containers are allocated manually and statically. An automatic method to identify and allocate optimal CPU resources to the containers can help to improve the efficiency of the scheduling algorithms. In this article, we introduce a new deep learning-based approach to allocate optimal CPU resources to the containers automatically. Our approach uses the law of diminishing marginal returns to determine the optimal number of CPU pins for containers to gain maximum performance while maximizing the number of concurrent jobs. The proposed method is evaluated using real workloads on a Docker-based containerized infrastructure. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution in reducing the completion time of the jobs by 23% to 74% compared to commonly used static CPU allocation methods.

MROS: A Lightweight Runtime Environment of ROS 1 nodes for Embedded Devices

mROS: A Lightweight Runtime Environment of ROS 1 nodes for Embedded Devices

一种面向云函数的超轻量运行时环境构建方法

一种面向云函数的超轻量运行时环境构建方法

HCRCaaS: A Handwritten Character Recognition Container as a Service Based on QoS Guarantee Algorithm

Handwritten character recognition (HCR) is a mainstream mobile device input method that has attracted significant research interest. Although previous studies have delivered reasonable recognition accuracy, it remains difficult to directly embed the advanced HCR service into mobile device software and obtain excellent but fast results. Cloud computing is a relatively new online computational resource provider which can satisfy the elastic resource requirements of the advanced HCR service with high-recognition accuracy. However, owing to the delay sensitivity of the character recognition service, the performance loss in the traditional cloud virtualization technology (e.g., kernel-based virtual machine (KVM)) may impair the performance. In addition, the improper computational resource scheduling in cloud computing impairs not only the performance but also the resource utilization. Thus, the HCR online service is required to guarantee the performance and improve the resource utilization of the HCR service in cloud computing. To address these problems, in this paper, we propose an HCR container as a service (HCRCaaS) in cloud computing. We address several key contributions: (1) designing an HCR engine on the basis of deep convolution neutral networks as a demo for an advanced HCR engine with better recognition accuracy, (2) providing an isolated lightweight runtime environment for high performance and easy expansion, and (3) designing a greedy resource scheduling algorithm based on the performance evaluation to optimize the resource utilization under a quality of service (QoS) guaranteeing. Experimental results show that our system not only reduces the performance loss compared with traditional cloud computing under the advanced HCR algorithm but also improves the resource utilization appropriately under the QoS guaranteeing. This study also provides a valuable reference for other related studies.

HaLoop Approach for Concept Generation in Formal Concept Analysis

This paper describes an efficient algorithm for formal concepts generation in large formal contexts. While many algorithms exist for concept generation, they are not suitable for generating concepts efficiently on larger contexts. We propose an algorithm named as HaLoopUNCG algorithm based on MapReduce framework that uses a lightweight runtime environment called HaLoop. HaLoop, a modified version of Hadoop MapReduce, suits better for iterative algorithms over large datasets. Our approach uses the features of HaLoop efficiently to generate concepts in an iterative manner. First, we describe the theoretical concepts of formal concept analysis and HaLoop. Second, we provide a detailed representation of our work based on Lindig’s fast concept analysis algorithm using HaLoop and MapReduce framework. The experimental evaluations demonstrate that HaLoopUNCG algorithm is performing better than Hadoop version of upper neighbour concept generation (MRUNCG) algorithm, MapReduce implementation of Ganter’s next closure algorithm and other distributed implementations of concept generation algorithms.

Model-Driven One-Sided Factorizations on Multicore Accelerated Systems

Hardware heterogeneity of the HPC platforms is no longer considered unusual but instead have become the most viable way forward towards Exascale. In fact, the multitude of the heterogeneous resources available to modern computers are designed for different workloads and their efficient use is closely aligned with the specialized role envisaged by their design. Commonly in order to efficiently use such GPU resources, the workload in question must have a much greater degree of parallelism than workloads often associated with multicore processors (CPUs). Available GPU variants differ in their internal architecture and, as a result, are capable of handling workloads of varying degrees of complexity and a range of computational patterns. This vast array of applicable workloads will likely lead to an ever accelerated mixing of multicore-CPUs and GPUs in multi-user environments with the ultimate goal of offering adequate computing facilities for a wide range of scientific and technical workloads. In the following paper, we present a research prototype that uses a lightweight runtime environment to manage the resource-specific workloads, and to control the dataflow and parallel execution in hybrid systems. Our lightweight runtime environment uses task superscalar concepts to enable the developer to write serial code while providing parallel execution. This concept is reminiscent of dataflow and systolic architectures in its conceptualization of a workload as a set of side-effect-free tasks that pass data items whenever the associated work assignment have been completed. Additionally, our task abstractions and their parametrization enable uniformity in the algorithmic development across all the heterogeneous resources without sacrificing precious compute cycles. We include performance results for dense linear algebra functions which demonstrate the practicality and effectiveness of our approach that is aptly capable of full utilization of a wide range of accelerator hardware.