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  • Runtime object lifetime profiler for latency sensitive big data applications
    Publication . Rodrigo, Bruno; Patrício, Duarte; Simão, José; Veiga, Luís; Ferreira, Paulo
    Latency sensitive services such as credit-card fraud detection and website targeted advertisement rely on Big Data platforms which run on top of memory managed runtimes, such as the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). These platforms, however, suffer from unpredictable and unacceptably high pause times due to inadequate memory management decisions (e.g., allocating objects with very different lifetimes next to each other, resulting in severe memory fragmentation). This leads to frequent and long application pause times, breaking Service Level Agreements (SLAs). This problem has been previously identified, and results show that current memory management techniques are ill-suited for applications that hold in memory massive amounts of long-lived objects (which is the case for a wide spectrum of Big Data applications). Previous works reduce such application pauses by allocating objects in off-heap, in special allocation regions/generations, or by using ultra-low latency Garbage Collectors (GC). However, all these solutions either require a combination of programmer effort and knowledge, source code access, offline profiling (with clear negative impacts on programmer's productivity), or impose a significant impact on application throughput and/or memory to reduce application pauses. We propose ROLP, a Runtime Object Lifetime Profiler that profiles application code at runtime and helps pretenuring GC algorithms allocating objects with similar lifetimes close to each other so that the overall fragmentation, GC effort, and application pauses are reduced. ROLP is implemented for the OpenJDK 8 and was evaluated with a recently proposed open-source pretenuring collector (NG2C). Results show long tail latencies reductions of up to 51% for Lucene, 85% for GraphChi, and 69% for Cassandra. This is achieved with negligible throughput (< 6%) and memory overhead, with no programmer effort, and no source code access.
  • Programming languages for data-Intensive HPC applications: A systematic mapping study
    Publication . Amaral, Vasco; Norberto, Beatriz; Goulão, Miguel; Aldinucci, Marco; Benkner, Siegfried; Bracciali, Andrea; Carreira, Paulo; Celms, Edgars; Correia, Luís; Grelck, Clemens; Karatza, Helen; Kessler, Christoph; Kilpatrick, Peter; Martiniano, Hugo; Mavridis, Ilias; PLLANA, Sabri; Respicio, Ana; Simão, José; Veiga, Luís; Visa, Ari Juha Eljas
    A major challenge in modelling and simulation is the need to combine expertise in both software technologies and a given scientific domain. When High-Performance Computing (HPC) is required to solve a scientific problem, software development becomes a problematic issue. Considering the complexity of the software for HPC, it is useful to identify programming languages that can be used to alleviate this issue. Because the existing literature on the topic of HPC is very dispersed, we performed a Systematic Mapping Study (SMS) in the context of the European COST Action cHiPSet. This literature study maps characteristics of various programming languages for data-intensive HPC applications, including category, typical user profiles, effectiveness, and type of articles. We organised the SMS in two phases. In the first phase, relevant articles are identified employing an automated keyword-based search in eight digital libraries. This lead to an initial sample of 420 papers, which was then narrowed down in a second phase by human inspection of article abstracts, titles and keywords to 152 relevant articles published in the period 2006-2018. The analysis of these articles enabled us to identify 26 programming languages referred to in 33 of relevant articles. We compared the outcome of the mapping study with results of our questionnaire-based survey that involved 57 HPC experts. The mapping study and the survey revealed that the desired features of programming languages for data-intensive HPC applications are portability, performance and usability. Furthermore, we observed that the majority of the programming languages used in the context of data-intensive HPC applications are text-based general-purpose programming languages. Typically these have a steep learning curve, which makes them difficult to adopt. We believe that the outcome of this study will inspire future research and development in programming languages for data-intensive HPC applications.