Wednesday, April 6, 2016

Ph.D. Defense: Patrick Donnelly

Patrick Donnelly successfully defended his Ph.D. titled "Data Locality Techniques in an Active Cluster Filesystem for Scientific Workflows". 

Congratulations to Dr. Donnelly!


The continued exponential growth of storage capacity has catalyzed the broad acquisition of scientific data which must be processed. While today's large data analysis systems are highly effective at establishing data locality and eliminating inter-dependencies, they are not so easily incorporated into scientific workflows that are often complex and irregular graphs of sequential programs with multiple dependencies. To address the needs of scientific computing, I propose the design of an active storage cluster file system which allows for execution of regular unmodified applications with full data
locality.

This dissertation analyzes the potential benefits of exploiting the structural information already available in scientific workflows -- the explicit dependencies -- to achieve a scalable and stable system. I begin with an outline of the design of the Confuga active storage cluster file system and its applicability to scientific computing. The remainder of the dissertation examines the techniques used to achieve a scalable and stable system. First, file system access by jobs is scoped to explicitly defined dependencies resolved at job dispatch. Second, workflow's structural information is harnessed to direct and control necessary file transfers to enforce cluster stability and maintain performance. Third, control of transfers is selectively relaxed to improve performance by limiting any negative effects of centralized transfer management.

This work benefits users by providing a complete batch execution platform joined with a cluster file system. The user does not need to redesign their workflow or provide additional consideration to the management of data dependencies. System stability and performance is managed by the cluster file
system while providing jobs with complete data locality. - See more at: http://cse.nd.edu/events/phd-defense-patrick-donnelly#sthash.4BLYgJYM.dpuf
DATA LOCALITY TECHNIQUES IN AN ACTIVE CLUSTER FILE SYSTEM DESIGNED FOR
SCIENTIFIC WORKFLOWS - See more at: http://cse.nd.edu/events/phd-defense-patrick-donnelly#sthash.4BLYgJYM.dpuf
DATA LOCALITY TECHNIQUES IN AN ACTIVE CLUSTER FILE SYSTEM DESIGNED FOR
SCIENTIFIC WORKFLOWS - See more at: http://cse.nd.edu/events/phd-defense-patrick-donnelly#sthash.4BLYgJYM.dpuf

Tuesday, March 22, 2016

Searching for Exo-Planets with Makeflow and Work Queue

Students at the University of Arizona made use of Makeflow and Work Queue to build an image processing pipeline on the Chameleon cloud testbed at TACC.

The course project was to build an image processing pipeline to accelerate the research of astronomer Jared Males, who designs instruments to search for exo-planets by observing the changes in appearance of a star.  This results in hundreds of thousands of images of a single star, which must then be processed in batch to eliminate noise and align the images.

The students built a solution (Find-R) which consumed over 100K CPU-hours on Chameleon, distributed using Makeflow and Work Queue.

Read more here:
https://www.tacc.utexas.edu/-/in-search-of-a-planet

Friday, March 18, 2016

Parrot talk at OSG All-hands meeting 2016

Ben Tovar gave a talk on using parrot to access CVMFS as part of the Open Science Grid (OSG) all-hands meeting in Clemson, SC.

Software access with parrot and CVMFS

Tuesday, February 16, 2016

CCTools 5.4.0 released

The Cooperative Computing Lab is pleased to announce the release of version 5.4.0 of the Cooperative Computing Tools including Parrot, Chirp, Makeflow, WorkQueue, Umbrella, SAND, All-Pairs, Weaver, and other software.

The software may be downloaded here:

http://www.cse.nd.edu/~ccl/software/download

This minor release adds several features and bug fixes. Among them:

  • [Catalog]  Catalog server communication is now done using JSON encoded queries and replies. (Douglas Thain)
  • [Makeflow] --skip-file-check added to mitigate overhead on network file systems. (Nick Hazekamp)
  • [Makeflow] Added amazon batch job interface. (Charles Shinaver)
  • [Resource Monitor] Network bandwidth, bytes received, and sent are now recorded. (Ben Tovar)
  • [Work Queue] Tasks may be grouped into categories, for resource control and fast abort. (Ben Tovar)
  • [Work Queue] work_queue_pool was renamed to work_queue_factory. (Douglas Thain)
  • [Work Queue] --condor-requirements to specify arbitrary HTCondor requirements in worker_queue_factory. (Chao Zheng)
  • [Work Queue] --factory-timeout to terminate worker_queue_factory when no master is active. (Neil Butcher)
  • [Work Queue] Compile-time option to specify default local settings in    sge_submit_workers. (Ben Tovar)
  • [Umbrella]   Several bugfixes. (Haiyan Meng, Alexander Vyushkov)
  • [Umbrella]   Added OSF, and S3 communication. (Haiyan Meng)
  • [Umbrella]   Added EC2 execution engine. (Haiyan Meng)
  • [Parrot] Several bug-fixes for memory mappings. (Patrick Donnelly)
  • [Parrot] All compiled services are shown under / (Tim Shaffer)
  • [Parrot] POSIX directory semantics. (Tim Shaffer)
  • [Parrot] Added new syscalls from Linux kernel 4.3. (Patrick Donnelly)

Thanks goes to the contributors for many features, bug fixes, and tests:

  • Jakob Blomer
  • Neil Butcher
  • Patrick Donnelly
  • Nathaniel Kremer-Herman
  • Nicholas Hazekamp
  • Peter Ivie
  • Kevin Lannon
  • Haiyan Meng
  • Tim Shaffer
  • Douglas Thain
  • Ben Tovar
  • Alexander VyushkovRodney Walker
  • Mathias Wolf
  • Anna Woodard
  • Chao Zheng

Please send any feedback to the CCTools discussion mailing list:

http://ccl.cse.nd.edu/software/help/

Enjoy!

Wednesday, February 3, 2016

Preservation Talk at Grid-5000

Prof. Thain gave a talk titled Preservation and Portability in Distributed Scientific Applications at the Grid-5000 Winter School on distributed computing in Grenoble, France.  I gave a broad overview of our recent efforts, including distributing software with Parrot and CVMFS, preserving high energy physics applications with Parrot, specifying environments with Umbrella, and preserving workflows with PRUNE.


Tuesday, January 12, 2016

Summer REU in DISC at Notre Dame

REU in Data Intensive Scientific Computing (DISC) at the University of Notre Dame
DISC combines big data, big science, and big computers at the University of Notre Dame. The only thing missing is you!


We invite outstanding undergraduates to apply for a summer research experience in DISC at the University of Notre Dame.  Students will spend ten weeks learning how to use high performance computing and big data technologies to attack scientific problems.  Majors in computer science, physics, biology, and related topics are encouraged to apply.

For more information:
http://disc.crc.nd.edu

Monday, November 23, 2015

CCTools 5.3.0 released

The Cooperative Computing Lab is pleased to announce the release of version 5.3.0 of the Cooperative Computing Tools including Parrot, Chirp, Makeflow, WorkQueue, Umbrella, SAND, All-Pairs, Weaver, and other software.

The software may be downloaded here:
http://www.cse.nd.edu/~ccl/software/download

This minor release adds several features and bug fixes. Among them:

  • [Makeflow]  Several enhancements in garbage collection. (Nick Hazekamp)
  • [Makeflow]  Better task state handling when recovering execution log. (Nick Hazekamp)
  • [Parrot]    Correct handling of multi-threaded programs. (Patrick Donnelly)
  • [Parrot]    Adds parrot_mount, to set arbitrary mount points while parrot is executing. (Douglas Thain)
  • [Parrot]    Add --fake-setuid option, for executables that request setuid. (Tim Shaffer)
  • [Parrot]    Update cvmfs uri to new convention. (Jakob Blomer)
  • [Parrot]    Add --whitelist to restrict filesystem access. (Tim Shaffer)
  • [Parrot]    Make special file descriptors invisible to tracee. (Patrick Donnelly)
  • [Resource Monitor] Compute approximations of shared resident memory. (Ben Tovar)
  • [Resource Monitor] Remove resource_monitorv for static binaries. resource_monitor now handles all cases.  (Ben Tovar)
  • [Resource Monitor] Working directories are not tracked by default anymore. Use --follow-chdir instead.  (Ben Tovar)
  • [Umbrella]  Support for curateND. (Haiyan Meng)
  • [Umbrella]  Support for installing software from package managers. (Haiyan Meng)
  • [Work Queue] Adds option -C to read a JSON configuration file. (Ben Tovar)
  • [Work Queue] Several bug fixes regarding task/workflow statistics. (Ben Tovar)
  • [Work Queue] Master's shutdown option now correctly terminates  workers. (Ben Tovar)
  • [Work Queue] Adds --sge-paremeter to ./configure script to personalize the sge_submit_workers script. (Ben Tovar)
  • [Work Queue] Adds the executable disk_allocator, to restrict disk usage at the workers. (Nate Kremer-Herman)


Incompatibility warnings:

  • Workers from this release do not work correctly with masters from previous releases.


Thanks goes to the contributors for many features, bug fixes, and tests:

  • Jakob Blomer
  • Neil Butcher
  • Patrick Donnelly
  • Nathaniel Kremer-Herman
  • Nicholas Hazekamp
  • Peter Ivie
  • Kevin Lannon
  • Haiyan Meng
  • Tim Shaffer
  • Douglas Thain
  • Ben Tovar
  • Mathias Wolf
  • Anna Woodard

Please send any feedback to the CCTools discussion mailing list:

http://ccl.cse.nd.edu/software/help/

Enjoy!

Monday, November 16, 2015

Analyzing LHC Data on 10K Cores with Lobster

Prof. Thain gave a talk titled Analyzing LHC Data on 10K Cores with Lobster at the Workshop on Data Intensive Computing in the Clouds at Supercomputing 2015.  The talk gave an overview of our collaboration with members of the CMS experiment at Notre Dame.  Together, we have built a data analysis system which can deploy the complex CMS computing environment on large clusters of non-dedicated machines.





Monday, November 9, 2015

Global Filesystems Paper in IEEE CiSE

Our latest paper, in collaboration with Jakob Blomer and the CVMFS team at CERN, describes the evolution of global-scale filesystems to serve the needs of the world-wide LHC experiment collaborations:



Delivering complex software across a worldwide distributed system is a major challenge in high-throughput scientific computing. The problem arises at different scales for many scientific communities that use grids, clouds, and distributed clusters to satisfy their computing needs. For high-energy physics (HEP) collaborations dealing with large amounts of data that rely on hundreds of thousands of cores spread around the world for data processing, the challenge is particularly acute. To serve the needs of the HEP community, several iterations were made to create a scalable, user-level filesystem that delivers software worldwide on a daily basis. The implementation was designed in 2006 to serve the needs of one experiment running on thousands of machines. Since that time, this idea evolved into a new production global-scale filesystem serving the needs of multiple science communities on hundreds of thousands of machines around the world. 

Tuesday, November 3, 2015

Preservation Talk at iPres 2015

Prof. Thain gave a talk titled "Preserving Scientific Software Executions: Preserve the Mess or Encourage Cleanliness" at the 2015 Conference on Digital Preservation.  This talk gives a high level overview of our work on preservation, encompassing packaging with Parrot, environment specification with Umbrella, and workflow preservation with Prune.