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Realistic, relevant, and reproducible experiments often need input traces collected from real-world environments. We focus in this work on traces of workflows---common in datacenters, clouds, and HPC infrastructures. We show that the state-of-the-art in using workflow-traces raises important issues: (1) the use of realistic traces is infrequent, and (2) the use of realistic, {it open-access} traces even more so. Alleviating these issues, we introduce the Workflow Trace Archive (WTA), an open-access archive of workflow traces from diverse computing infrastructures and tooling to parse, validate, and analyze traces. The WTA includes ${>}48$ million workflows captured from ${>}10$ computing infrastructures, representing a broad diversity of trace domains and characteristics. To emphasize the importance of trace diversity, we characterize the WTA contents and analyze in simulation the impact of trace diversity on experiment results. Our results indicate significant differences in characteristics, properties, and workflow structures between workload sources, domains, and fields.
Workflows are prevalent in todays computing infrastructures. The workflow model support various different domains, from machine learning to finance and from astronomy to chemistry. Different Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements and other desires of both users and providers makes workflow scheduling a tough problem, especially since resource providers need to be as efficient as possible with their resources to be competitive. To a newcomer or even an experienced researcher, sifting through the vast amount of articles can be a daunting task. Questions regarding the difference techniques, policies, emerging areas, and opportunities arise. Surveys are an excellent way to cover these questions, yet surveys rarely publish their tools and data on which it is based. Moreover, the communities that are behind these articles are rarely studied. We attempt to address these shortcomings in this work. We focus on four areas within workflow scheduling: 1) the workflow formalism, 2) workflow allocation, 3) resource provisioning, and 4) applications and services. Each part features one or more taxonomies, a view of the community, important and emerging keywords, and directions for future work. We introduce and make open-source an instrument we used to combine and store article meta-data. Using this meta-data, we 1) obtain important keywords overall and per year, per community, 2) identify keywords growing in importance, 3) get insight into the structure and relations within each community, and 4) perform a systematic literature survey per part to validate and complement our taxonomies.
This paper describes the achievements of the H2020 project INDIGO-DataCloud. The project has provided e-infrastructures with tools, applications and cloud framework enhancements to manage the demanding requirements of scientific communities, either locally or through enhanced interfaces. The middleware developed allows to federate hybrid resources, to easily write, port and run scientific applications to the cloud. In particular, we have extended existing PaaS (Platform as a Service) solutions, allowing public and private e-infrastructures, including those provided by EGI, EUDAT, and Helix Nebula, to integrate their existing services and make them available through AAI services compliant with GEANT interfederation policies, thus guaranteeing transparency and trust in the provisioning of such services. Our middleware facilitates the execution of applications using containers on Cloud and Grid based infrastructures, as well as on HPC clusters. Our developments are freely downloadable as open source components, and are already being integrated into many scientific applications.
Scientific workflows are a cornerstone of modern scientific computing. They are used to describe complex computational applications that require efficient and robust management of large volumes of data, which are typically stored/processed at heterogeneous, distributed resources. The workflow research and development community has employed a number of methods for the quantitative evaluation of existing and novel workflow algorithms and systems. In particular, a common approach is to simulate workflow executions. In previous work, we have presented a collection of tools that have been used for aiding research and development activities in the Pegasus project, and that have been adopted by others for conducting workflow research. Despite their popularity, there are several shortcomings that prevent easy adoption, maintenance, and consistency with the evolving structures and computational requirements of production workflows. In this work, we present WorkflowHub, a community framework that provides a collection of tools for analyzing workflow execution traces, producing realistic synthetic workflow traces, and simulating workflow executions. We demonstrate the realism of the generated synthetic traces by comparing simulated executions of these traces with actual workflow executions. We also contrast these results with those obtained when using the previously available collection of tools. We find that our framework not only can be used to generate representative synthetic workflow traces (i.e., with workflow structures and task characteristics distributions that resembles those in traces obtained from real-world workflow executions), but can also generate representative workflow traces at larger scales than that of available workflow traces.
Internet supercomputing is an approach to solving partitionable, computation-intensive problems by harnessing the power of a vast number of interconnected computers. For the problem of using network supercomputing to perform a large collection of independent tasks, prior work introduced a decentralized approach and provided randomized synchronous algorithms that perform all tasks correctly with high probability, while dealing with misbehaving or crash-prone processors. The main weaknesses of existing algorithms is that they assume either that the emph{average} probability of a non-crashed processor returning incorrect results is inferior to $frac{1}{2}$, or that the probability of returning incorrect results is known to emph{each} processor. Here we present a randomized synchronous distributed algorithm that tightly estimates the probability of each processor returning correct results. Starting with the set $P$ of $n$ processors, let $F$ be the set of processors that crash. Our algorithm estimates the probability $p_i$ of returning a correct result for each processor $i in P-F$, making the estimates available to all these processors. The estimation is based on the $(epsilon, delta)$-approximation, where each estimated probability $tilde{p_i}$ of $p_i$ obeys the bound ${sf Pr}[p_i(1-epsilon) leq tilde{p_i} leq p_i(1+epsilon)] > 1 - delta$, for any constants $delta >0$ and $epsilon >0$ chosen by the user. An important aspect of this algorithm is that each processor terminates without global coordination. We assess the efficiency of the algorithm in three adversarial models as follows. For the model where the number of non-crashed processors $|P-F|$ is linearly bounded the time complexity $T(n)$ of the algorithm is $Theta(log{n})$, work complexity $W(n)$ is $Theta(nlog{n})$, and message complexity $M(n)$ is $Theta(nlog^2n)$.
Linked Open Data (LOD) is the publicly available RDF data in the Web. Each LOD entity is identfied by a URI and accessible via HTTP. LOD encodes globalscale knowledge potentially available to any human as well as artificial intelligence that may want to benefit from it as background knowledge for supporting their tasks. LOD has emerged as the backbone of applications in diverse fields such as Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval, Computer Vision, Speech Recognition, and many more. Nevertheless, regardless of the specific tasks that LOD-based tools aim to address, the reuse of such knowledge may be challenging for diverse reasons, e.g. semantic heterogeneity, provenance, and data quality. As aptly stated by Heath et al. Linked Data might be outdated, imprecise, or simply wrong: there arouses a necessity to investigate the problem of linked data validity. This work reports a collaborative effort performed by nine teams of students, guided by an equal number of senior researchers, attending the International Semantic Web Research School (ISWS 2018) towards addressing such investigation from different perspectives coupled with different approaches to tackle the issue.