No Arabic abstract
The amazing advances being made in the fields of machine and deep learning are a highlight of the Big Data era for both enterprise and research communities. Modern applications require resources beyond a single nodes ability to provide. However this is just a small part of the issues facing the overall data processing environment, which must also support a raft of data engineering for pre- and post-data processing, communication, and system integration. An important requirement of data analytics tools is to be able to easily integrate with existing frameworks in a multitude of languages, thereby increasing user productivity and efficiency. All this demands an efficient and highly distributed integrated approach for data processing, yet many of todays popular data analytics tools are unable to satisfy all these requirements at the same time. In this paper we present Cylon, an open-source high performance distributed data processing library that can be seamlessly integrated with existing Big Data and AI/ML frameworks. It is developed with a flexible C++ core on top of a compact data structure and exposes language bindings to C++, Java, and Python. We discuss Cylons architecture in detail, and reveal how it can be imported as a library to existing applications or operate as a standalone framework. Initial experiments show that Cylon enhances popular tools such as Apache Spark and Dask with major performance improvements for key operations and better component linkages. Finally, we show how its design enables Cylon to be used cross-platform with minimum overhead, which includes popular AI tools such as PyTorch, Tensorflow, and Jupyter notebooks.
An emerging class of data-intensive applications involve the geographically dispersed extraction of complex scientific information from very large collections of measured or computed data. Such applications arise, for example, in experimental physics, where the data in question is generated by accelerators, and in simulation science, where the data is generated by supercomputers. So-called Data Grids provide essential infrastructure for such applications, much as the Internet provides essential services for applications such as e-mail and the Web. We describe here two services that we believe are fundamental to any Data Grid: reliable, high-speed transporet and replica management. Our high-speed transport service, GridFTP, extends the popular FTP protocol with new features required for Data Grid applciations, such as striping and partial file access. Our replica management service integrates a replica catalog with GridFTP transfers to provide for the creation, registration, location, and management of dataset replicas. We present the design of both services and also preliminary performance results. Our implementations exploit security and other services provided by the Globus Toolkit.
Data-intensive applications are becoming commonplace in all science disciplines. They are comprised of a rich set of sub-domains such as data engineering, deep learning, and machine learning. These applications are built around efficient data abstractions and operators that suit the applications of different domains. Often lack of a clear definition of data structures and operators in the field has led to other implementations that do not work well together. The HPTMT architecture that we proposed recently, identifies a set of data structures, operators, and an execution model for creating rich data applications that links all aspects of data engineering and data science together efficiently. This paper elaborates and illustrates this architecture using an end-to-end application with deep learning and data engineering parts working together.
Developing modern systems software is a complex task that combines business logic programming and Software Performance Engineering (SPE). The later is an experimental and labor-intensive activity focused on optimizing the system for a given hardware, software, and workload (hw/sw/wl) context. Todays SPE is performed during build/release phases by specialized teams, and cursed by: 1) lack of standardized and automated tools, 2) significant repeated work as hw/sw/wl context changes, 3) fragility induced by a one-size-fit-all tuning (where improvements on one workload or component may impact others). The net result: despite costly investments, system software is often outside its optimal operating point - anecdotally leaving 30% to 40% of performance on the table. The recent developments in Data Science (DS) hints at an opportunity: combining DS tooling and methodologies with a new developer experience to transform the practice of SPE. In this paper we present: MLOS, an ML-powered infrastructure and methodology to democratize and automate Software Performance Engineering. MLOS enables continuous, instance-level, robust, and trackable systems optimization. MLOS is being developed and employed within Microsoft to optimize SQL Server performance. Early results indicated that component-level optimizations can lead to 20%-90% improvements when custom-tuning for a specific hw/sw/wl, hinting at a significant opportunity. However, several research challenges remain that will require community involvement. To this end, we are in the process of open-sourcing the MLOS core infrastructure, and we are engaging with academic institutions to create an educational program around Software 2.0 and MLOS ideas.
We document the data transfer workflow, data transfer performance, and other aspects of staging approximately 56 terabytes of climate model output data from the distributed Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) archive to the National Energy Research Supercomputing Center (NERSC) at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory required for tracking and characterizing extratropical storms, a phenomena of importance in the mid-latitudes. We present this analysis to illustrate the current challenges in assembling multi-model data sets at major computing facilities for large-scale studies of CMIP5 data. Because of the larger archive size of the upcoming CMIP6 phase of model intercomparison, we expect such data transfers to become of increasing importance, and perhaps of routine necessity. We find that data transfer rates using the ESGF are often slower than what is typically available to US residences and that there is significant room for improvement in the data transfer capabilities of the ESGF portal and data centers both in terms of workflow mechanics and in data transfer performance. We believe performance improvements of at least an order of magnitude are within technical reach using current best practices, as illustrated by the performance we achieved in transferring the complete raw data set between two high performance computing facilities. To achieve these performance improvements, we recommend: that current best practices (such as the Science DMZ model) be applied to the data servers and networks at ESGF data centers; that sufficient financial and human resources be devoted at the ESGF data centers for systems and network engineering tasks to support high performance data movement; and that performance metrics for data transfer between ESGF data centers and major computing facilities used for climate data analysis be established, regularly tested, and published.
Advances in sequencing techniques have led to exponential growth in biological data, demanding the development of large-scale bioinformatics experiments. Because these experiments are computation- and data-intensive, they require high-performance computing (HPC) techniques and can benefit from specialized technologies such as Scientific Workflow Management Systems (SWfMS) and databases. In this work, we present BioWorkbench, a framework for managing and analyzing bioinformatics experiments. This framework automatically collects provenance data, including both performance data from workflow execution and data from the scientific domain of the workflow application. Provenance data can be analyzed through a web application that abstracts a set of queries to the provenance database, simplifying access to provenance information. We evaluate BioWorkbench using three case studies: SwiftPhylo, a phylogenetic tree assembly workflow; SwiftGECKO, a comparative genomics workflow; and RASflow, a RASopathy analysis workflow. We analyze each workflow from both computational and scientific domain perspectives, by using queries to a provenance and annotation database. Some of these queries are available as a pre-built feature of the BioWorkbench web application. Through the provenance data, we show that the framework is scalable and achieves high-performance, reducing up to 98% of the case studies execution time. We also show how the application of machine learning techniques can enrich the analysis process.