Load balancing and auto scaling are at the core of scalable, contemporary systems, addressing dynamic resource allocation and service rate adjustments in response to workload changes. This paper introduces a novel model and algorithms for tuning load balancers coupled with auto scalers, considering bursty traffic arriving at finite queues. We begin by presenting the problem as a weakly coupled Markov Decision Processes (MDP), solvable via a linear program (LP). However, as the number of control variables of such LP grows combinatorially, we introduce a more tractable relaxed LP formulation, and extend it to tackle the problem of online parameter learning and policy optimization using a two-timescale algorithm based on the LP Lagrangian.
Most existing datacenter transport protocols rely on in-order packet delivery, a design choice rooted in legacy systems and simplicity. However, advancements in technology, such as RDMA, have made it feasible to relax this requirement, allowing for more effective use of modern datacenter topologies like FatTree and Dragonfly. The rise of AI/ML workloads underscores the necessity for enhanced link utilization, a challenge for single-path load balancers due to issues like ECMP collisions. In this paper, we introduce REPS, a novel per-packet traffic load-balancing algorithm that integrates seamlessly with existing congestion control mechanisms. REPS reroutes packets around congested hotspots and unreliable or failing links with remarkable simplicity and minimal state requirements. Our evaluation demonstrates that REPS significantly outperforms traditional packet spraying and other state-of-the-art solutions in datacenter networks, offering substantial improvements in performance and link utilization.
Version control systems are integral to software development, with GitHub emerging as a popular online platform due to its comprehensive project management tools, including issue tracking and pull requests. However, GitHub lacks a direct link between issues and commits, making it difficult for developers to understand how specific issues are resolved. Although GitHub's Insights page provides some visualization for repository data, the representation of issues and commits related data in a textual format hampers quick evaluation of issue management. This paper presents a prototype web application that generates visualizations to offer insights into issue timelines and reveals different factors related to issues. It focuses on the lifecycle of issues and depicts vital information to enhance users' understanding of development patterns in their projects. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through case studies involving three open-source GitHub repositories. Furthermore, we conducted a user evaluation to validate the efficacy of our prototype in conveying crucial repository information more efficiently and rapidly.
In applications related to big data and service computing, dynamic connections tend to be encountered, especially the dynamic data of user-perspective quality of service (QoS) in Web services. They are transformed into high-dimensional and incomplete (HDI) tensors which include abundant temporal pattern information. Latent factorization of tensors (LFT) is an extremely efficient and typical approach for extracting such patterns from an HDI tensor. However, current LFT models require the QoS data to be maintained in a central place (e.g., a central server), which is impossible for increasingly privacy-sensitive users. To address this problem, this article creatively designs a federated learning based on latent factorization of tensors (FL-LFT). It builds a data-density -oriented federated learning model to enable isolated users to collaboratively train a global LFT model while protecting user's privacy. Extensive experiments on a QoS dataset collected from the real world verify that FL-LFT shows a remarkable increase in prediction accuracy when compared to state-of-the-art federated learning (FL) approaches.
The need for data security and model integrity has been accentuated by the rapid adoption of AI and ML in data-driven domains including healthcare, finance, and security. Large models are crucial for tasks like diagnosing diseases and forecasting finances but tend to be delicate and not very scalable. Decentralized systems solve this issue by distributing the workload and reducing central points of failure. Yet, data and processes spread across different nodes can be at risk of unauthorized access, especially when they involve sensitive information. Nesa solves these challenges with a comprehensive framework using multiple techniques to protect data and model outputs. This includes zero-knowledge proofs for secure model verification. The framework also introduces consensus-based verification checks for consistent outputs across nodes and confirms model integrity. Split Learning divides models into segments processed by different nodes for data privacy by preventing full data access at any single point. For hardware-based security, trusted execution environments are used to protect data and computations within secure zones. Nesa's state-of-the-art proofs and principles demonstrate the framework's effectiveness, making it a promising approach for securely democratizing artificial intelligence.
In distributed computing by mobile robots, robots are deployed over a region, continuous or discrete, operating through a sequence of \textit{look-compute-move} cycles. An extensive study has been carried out to understand the computational powers of different robot models. The models vary on the ability to 1)~remember constant size information and 2)~communicate constant size message. Depending on the abilities the different models are 1)~$\mathcal{OBLOT}$ (robots are oblivious and silent), 2)~$\mathcal{FSTA}$ (robots have finite states but silent), 3)~$\mathcal{FCOM}$ (robots are oblivious but can communicate constant size information) and, 4)~$\mathcal{LUMI}$ (robots have finite states and can communicate constant size information). Another factor that affects computational ability is the scheduler that decides the activation time of the robots. The main three schedulers are \textit{fully-synchronous}, \textit{semi-synchronous} and \textit{asynchronous}. Combining the models ($M$) with schedulers ($K$), we have twelve combinations $M^K$. In the euclidean domain, the comparisons between these twelve variants have been done in different works for transparent robots, opaque robots, and robots with limited visibility. There is a vacant space for similar works when robots are operating on discrete regions like networks. It demands separate research attention because there have been a series of works where robots operate on different networks, and there is a fundamental difference when robots are operating on a continuous domain versus a discrete domain in terms of robots' movement. This work contributes to filling the space by giving a full comparison table for all models with two synchronous schedulers: fully-synchronous and semi-synchronous.
We develop a new neural network architecture that strictly enforces constitutive constraints such as polyconvexity, frame-indifference, and the symmetry of the stress and material stiffness. Additionally, we show that the accuracy of the stress and material stiffness predictions is significantly improved for this neural network by using a Sobolev minimization strategy that includes derivative terms. Using our neural network, we model the constitutive behavior of fibrous-type discrete network material. With Sobolev minimization, we obtain a normalized mean square error of 0.15% for the strain energy density, 0.815% averaged across the components of the stress, and 5.4% averaged across the components of the stiffness tensor. This machine-learned constitutive model was deployed in a finite element simulation of a facet capsular ligament. The displacement fields and stress-strain curves were compared to a multiscale simulation that required running on a GPU-based supercomputer. The new approach maintained upward of 85% accuracy in stress up to 70% strain while reducing the computation cost by orders of magnitude.
Aligning future system design with the ever-increasing compute needs of large language models (LLMs) is undoubtedly an important problem in today's world. Here, we propose a general performance modeling methodology and workload analysis of distributed LLM training and inference through an analytical framework that accurately considers compute, memory sub-system, network, and various parallelization strategies (model parallel, data parallel, pipeline parallel, and sequence parallel). We validate our performance predictions with published data from literature and relevant industry vendors (e.g., NVIDIA). For distributed training, we investigate the memory footprint of LLMs for different activation re-computation methods, dissect the key factors behind the massive performance gain from A100 to B200 ($\sim$ 35x speed-up closely following NVIDIA's scaling trend), and further run a design space exploration at different technology nodes (12 nm to 1 nm) to study the impact of logic, memory, and network scaling on the performance. For inference, we analyze the compute versus memory boundedness of different operations at a matrix-multiply level for different GPU systems and further explore the impact of DRAM memory technology scaling on inference latency. Utilizing our modeling framework, we reveal the evolution of performance bottlenecks for both LLM training and inference with technology scaling, thus, providing insights to design future systems for LLM training and inference.
Intelligent transportation systems play a crucial role in modern traffic management and optimization, greatly improving traffic efficiency and safety. With the rapid development of generative artificial intelligence (Generative AI) technologies in the fields of image generation and natural language processing, generative AI has also played a crucial role in addressing key issues in intelligent transportation systems, such as data sparsity, difficulty in observing abnormal scenarios, and in modeling data uncertainty. In this review, we systematically investigate the relevant literature on generative AI techniques in addressing key issues in different types of tasks in intelligent transportation systems. First, we introduce the principles of different generative AI techniques, and their potential applications. Then, we classify tasks in intelligent transportation systems into four types: traffic perception, traffic prediction, traffic simulation, and traffic decision-making. We systematically illustrate how generative AI techniques addresses key issues in these four different types of tasks. Finally, we summarize the challenges faced in applying generative AI to intelligent transportation systems, and discuss future research directions based on different application scenarios.
Autonomic computing investigates how systems can achieve (user) specified control outcomes on their own, without the intervention of a human operator. Autonomic computing fundamentals have been substantially influenced by those of control theory for closed and open-loop systems. In practice, complex systems may exhibit a number of concurrent and inter-dependent control loops. Despite research into autonomic models for managing computer resources, ranging from individual resources (e.g., web servers) to a resource ensemble (e.g., multiple resources within a data center), research into integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to improve resource autonomy and performance at scale continues to be a fundamental challenge. The integration of AI/ML to achieve such autonomic and self-management of systems can be achieved at different levels of granularity, from full to human-in-the-loop automation. In this article, leading academics, researchers, practitioners, engineers, and scientists in the fields of cloud computing, AI/ML, and quantum computing join to discuss current research and potential future directions for these fields. Further, we discuss challenges and opportunities for leveraging AI and ML in next generation computing for emerging computing paradigms, including cloud, fog, edge, serverless and quantum computing environments.
Deep neural networks have revolutionized many machine learning tasks in power systems, ranging from pattern recognition to signal processing. The data in these tasks is typically represented in Euclidean domains. Nevertheless, there is an increasing number of applications in power systems, where data are collected from non-Euclidean domains and represented as the graph-structured data with high dimensional features and interdependency among nodes. The complexity of graph-structured data has brought significant challenges to the existing deep neural networks defined in Euclidean domains. Recently, many studies on extending deep neural networks for graph-structured data in power systems have emerged. In this paper, a comprehensive overview of graph neural networks (GNNs) in power systems is proposed. Specifically, several classical paradigms of GNNs structures (e.g., graph convolutional networks, graph recurrent neural networks, graph attention networks, graph generative networks, spatial-temporal graph convolutional networks, and hybrid forms of GNNs) are summarized, and key applications in power systems such as fault diagnosis, power prediction, power flow calculation, and data generation are reviewed in detail. Furthermore, main issues and some research trends about the applications of GNNs in power systems are discussed.