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Infrastructure for Scalable ServicesAre we Ready Yet?

Angelos Bilas

bilas@ics.forth.grInstitute of Computer Science (ICS)

Foundation of Research and Technology – Hellas (FORTH)

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Outline

• Who we are & what we do• Issues with future computing infrastructure• Topics of interest within DeSIRE/DeFINE

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Foundation Of Research and Technology- Hellas (FORTH)

• Largest Research Center in Greece– Located in Heraklion,

Crete

• 1000 Employees– 100 University Professors– 120 Researchers

• 34M€ Annual Budget– 20% Government– 260 Research Projects

• 6 Spin-off Companies

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Institute of Computer Science (ICS) • One of seven institutes in

FORTH– 20 Researchers– 50 Staff Members– 120 Students

• Cutting-edge research in various areas– Information

Systems/Databases– Computer Systems/Networks– Human Computer Interaction– Vision and Robotics– Medical Informatics

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Computer Systems Research Topics

• Systems software• Middleware and runtime

systems• Parallel and distributed

systems• Interconnection networks• Application specific

microprocessors• VLSI and hardware design• Applications

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Access Points

Computational View of the World• Model for numerous services

– Thin access points (clients)– Scalable backend servers– Connectivity

• Today, lot’s of pressure on backend– More and more access points

• Continuously increases– Existing services are offered

directly to customers, e.g. medical info

– New services are made possible, e.g. entertainment industry and multiplayer games

Services

Network

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State-of-The-Art for Scalable Infrastructure

• There has been a lot of progress on performance• However, many remaining problems

– Manageability• e.g. Dynamically/automatically adjust to environment changes

– Ease-of-use• e.g. Develop new applications/services

– Reliability and Availability– Security

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Outline

• Who we are & what we do • Issues with future computing infrastructure • Topics of interest within DeSIRE/DeFINE

– Reliability and Availability– Security

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Reliability and Availability

• We do poorly today in scalable, commodity infrastructure– Frequent failures– Slow recovery– Unacceptable situation

• Recent activity in dealing with problems in the systems community– Conferences: ISCA, ASPLOS, HPCA

• Most work assumes– Commercial applications (although difficulties to find workloads) – Treat as multithreaded programs– Run on shared memory multiprocessors

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Our Approach [HPCA2003]• Use commodity clusters as the

underlying system• Run multithreaded applications

without modification– Software shared memory

• Provide reliability support in middleware – Runtime system

• Dynamic replication of system and application state at runtime

• When failure occurs, use the second copy to recover

Any application

Interconnect

System Abstraction

(Middleware)

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Lessons Learned

• Design and implementation on a 64 processor cluster– It works– Performance impact can be small

• Between 20-100% of execution time

– Transparent to applications– Replication is a powerful mechanism

• But…– Very complex: Mostly due to implementation issues– I/O semantics lead to unclear failure semantics– Don’t cheat with applications: Use commercial apps

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Going Forward

• Need to understand – Nature of failures– Interfaces between system layers– State in each system layer– Application requirements (but strive for transparency)

• Design and build – Realistic prototypes that demonstrate solutions– In real setups with real applications

• Bridge gab between systems building with more rigorous approaches

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Security (contact person Prof. Evangelos Markatos)

• Security is becoming an inhibiting concern– A lot of focus on improving throughput/response times– However, various types of attacks that cost a lot

• Difficult problem– Fast networks, advanced features (QoS, etc.)

• Our approach: Use the network interface– Work at lower system layers, closer to the network– Take advantage of technology trends (network processors, etc.)

• Goal: Examine how we can integrate methods for– Intrusion detection– Denial of service attacks

• Deliver hardware/software to demonstrate realistic solutions

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Summary

• Solid systems expertise• Domain

– Scalable computing infrastructure for novel services

• Topics of interest within DeSIRE/DeFINE– Reliability and Availability– Security

• Welcome collaborations with groups that have– Similar interests– Complementary expertise

• Draft a document for work in the area

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Contact Information

Angelos BilasAssociate Professorbilas@ics.forth.gr

Institute of Computer Science (ICS)Foundation of Research and Technology – Hellas (FORTH)

http://www.ics.forth.gr