Summer 2007

Participants

Summer 2007 REU students (Xabriel J. Collazo-Mojica, Javier Figueroa, Sean Leslie, Michael McFail, Barbara Morales, Joseph Naps, Alex Orta, Alain Esteva Ramirez, Ricardo Tirado, Ellen Wagner), graduate students and faculty mentors

Name	Home Institution	Year	Mentor
Javier Figueroa	Florida International University	Junior	Dr. S Masoud Sadjadi
Sean Leslie	Florida International University	Junior	Dr. Peter J. Clarke
Michael McFail	Indiana University of Pennsylvania	Junior	Dr. S Masoud Sadjadi
Xabriel J Collazo Mojica	University of Puerto Rico - Mayaguez	Junior	Dr. S Masoud Sadjadi
Barbara Morales	University of Puerto Rico - Mayaguez	Junior	Dr. Peter J. Clarke
Joseph Naps	University of Wisconsin - Madison	Junior	Dr. Raju Rangaswami
Alexander Orta	Florida International University	Junior	Dr. S Masoud Sadjadi
Alain Esteva Ramirez	Florida International University	Junior	Dr. Peter J. Clarke
Ricardo Tirado	University of Puerto Rico - Mayaguez	Junior	Dr. Peter J. Clarke
Ellen Wagner	College of Wooster	Sophomore	Dr. Raju Rangaswami

Activities

Research and Education:

Dates	Activities	Coordinator(s)
May 21 - May 21	Welcome Tour of School and University Facilities Presentation - Introduction to Autonomic Computing Presentation - What is Research? Assignment of Projects	Dr. Milani and Dr. Li
May 27	Start of Research Activities	Mentors
June 7	Progress Presentation 1	Dr. Milani
June 28	Progress Presentation 2	Dr. Milani
July 20	Progress Presentation 3	Dr. Milani
August 10	Final Project Presentation	Dr. Milani

Other Activities:

Dates	Activities	Coordinator(s)
Regularly	Visit to Bowling Alley
	Visit to Coconut Grove	Dr. Milani
June 9	Snorkeling Trip	Drs. Milani and Rangaswami
July 4	Independence Day Party	Dr. Clarke
August 5	Barbecue and Pool Party	Dr. Milani
August 7	South Beach Trip	Dr. Clarke

Projects

1. Title: UPGRAID: Usage-based stripe replicating RAID



Participants: Joe Naps, Ellen Wagner, Jorge Guerra (Ph.D. Student), Luis Useche (Ph.D. Student), and Dr. Raju Rangaswami (mentor)

Project Description: Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) is the standard for large scale, fault-tolerant storage solutions. The various RAID levels combine space and/or performance optimization to meet the needs of the user. In the project, we developed UPGRAID, which can be seen as a new RAID level built upon RAID5. The idea behind UPGRAID is that, by allocating a small amount of disk space for RAID stripe replication, substantial gains can be seen in both reducing response time during normal operation and reducing overall reconstruction time when a drive fails. This decrease is important as reconstruction is the most vulnerable time for a RAID5 system because another disk failure would render the array useless.

Presentations: Upgraid-Final-Presentation

Publications: Joseph Naps, Ellen Wagner, Jorge Guerra, Luis Useche, and Raju Rangaswami, "UPGRAID:Usage-based striPe replicatinG RAID", Under preparation



2. Title: Tools for Testing ABLE Services



Participants: Ellen Wagner, Jorge Guerra (Ph.D. Student), Luis Useche (Ph.D. Student), Medha Bhadkamkar (Ph.D. Student), and Dr. Raju Rangaswami (mentor)

Project Description: Guaranteeing that systems perform correctly is imperative for system administrators and developers. Therefore there is a need for tools which test all parts and combinations of workloads. Systems handle a series of I/O requests for every action performed by the system, thus in order to assure consistency those I/O requests need to be handled properly. I/O requests can be either a read or a write and it is important that these operations get sent to the correct disk location and do not interfere with or corrupt existing data. Another important task for the tools is to simulate the environment in which the system will be run. System administrators will want to be prepared for the reaction of the system when run at any level of production. This second tool will give feedback as to what it predicts will happen when the user specifies a workload, and then both the developer and system administrator will know how the system will respond to various situations. This project involved building a storage block-layer 'integrity checker' and 'workload generator' test tools that can be used to test new block-layer extensions in the Linux storage stack.

Presentations: ABLE-Testing-Final-Presentation

Publications: Jorge Guerra, Luis Useche, Medha Bhadkamkar, Ellen Wagner*, and Raju Rangaswami, "Active Block Layer Extensions", Under preparation



3. Title: Self-Testing of Autonomic Computing Systems



Participants: Barbara Morales, Alain Esteva Ramirez, Tariq King (PhD student), and Dr. Peter J. Clarke (mentor)

Project Description: This project built on the work done by the REU 2006 students which involved investigating a component-based mechanism for safe dynamic adaptation that can be used in the validation of autonomic computing systems. The results of the project included: (1) an object-oriented (OO) design for the data structure which can be used to store the component dependencies, and build a safe adaptation graph that would be used to compute the sequence of adaptation steps; (2) a prototype of an autonomic system was developed including components such as orchestrating autonomic managers, touchpoint autonomic managers, and knowledge sources for a job scheduling application which incorporated self-configuration and self-optimization features.

Presentations:

• Presentation 1 (download)
• Presentation 2 (download)
• Final Presentation (download)



Publications:

• Alain E. Ramirez, Barbara Morales and Tariq M. King. A Self-Testing Autonomic Job Scheduler, Proceedings of the 46th ACM Southeast Conference, ACMSE '08. Accepted February 2008.

• Tariq M. King, Alain E. Ramirez, Barbara Morales and Peter J. Clarke. A Reusable Object-Oriented Design to Support Self-Testable Autonomic Software. The 23rd ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, Track on Autonomic Computing. Accepted October 21, 2007.

• Tariq M. King, Alain E. Ramirez, Rodolfo Cruz, Peter J. Clarke. An Integrated Self-Testing Framework for Autonomic Computing Systems. Journal of Computers. Academy Publisher, 2(9) November 2007, pages 37-49.



4. Title: Self-Configuring Communication Services for a Communication Virtual Machine



Participants: Sean Leslie, Ricardo Tirado, Andrew Allen (PhD student) and Dr. Peter J. Clarke (mentor)

Project Description: The project investigated how to extend the functionality of a Network Communication Broker (NCB), a layer in the Communication Virtual Machine (CVM) that interfaces with the underlying networks, to utilize multiple communication APIs and the dynamic configuration of these APIs in NCB. An extensive review of the following communication APIs was performed: NCB, Skype, Libjingle, Google Talk's C++, Eclipse Communication Framework and Java MSN Messenger Library (JML). The results of the project included: (1) dynamic models (UML activity diagrams) and static models (UML class diagrams) for the self-configuring capability of the NCB. A prototype of the self-configuring NCB was also built.

Presentations:

• Presentation 1 (download)
• Presentation 2 (download)
• Final Presentation (download)



Publications:

• Andrew Allen, Sean Leslie, Ricardo Tirado, Yali Wu and Peter J. Clarke. Self-Configuring User-Centric Communication Services. The 3rd International Conference on Systems (ICONS 2008). Accepted December, 2007.



5. Title: Transparent Grid Enablement of Weather Research and Forecasting



Participants: Javier Figueroa, Xabriel J Collazo Mojica, Michael McFail, Alexander Orta, David Villegas (PhD Student), Javier Muñoz (PhD Student), Diego Lopez (PhD Student), and Dr. S. Masoud Sadjadi (mentor)

Project Description: The impact of hurricanes is so devastating throughout different levels of society that there is a pressing need to provide a range of users with accurate and timely information that can enable effective planning for and response to potential hurricane landfalls. The Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) code is the latest numerical model that has been adopted by meteorological services worldwide. The current version of WRF has not been designed to scale out of a single organization's local computing resources. However, the high resource requirements of WRF for fine-resolution and ensemble forecasting demand a large number of computing nodes, which typically cannot be found within one organization. Therefore, there is a pressing need for the Grid-enablement of the WRF code such that it can utilize resources available in partner organizations. In this project, we investigate Grid enablement of WRF by leveraging our work in transparent shaping, GRID superscalar, profiling, code inspection, code modeling, meta-scheduling, and job flow management.

Presentations:

• First Presentation, June 28,2007
• Second Presentation, July 19,2007
• Third Presentation, August 10,2007



Publications:

• Conference Papers:

  S. Masoud Sadjadi, Shu Shimizu, Javier Figueroa, Raju Rangaswami, Javier Delgado, Hector Duran, and Xabriel Collazo. A modeling approach for estimating execution time of long-running scientific applications. In Proceedings of the Fifth High-Performance Grid Computing Workshop (HPGC-2008), Miami, Florida, April 2008. (accepted for publication.).

  S. Masoud Sadjadi, Liana Fong, Rosa M. Badia, Javier Figueroa, Javier Delgado, Xabriel J. Collazo-Mojica, Khalid Saleem, Raju Rangaswami, Shu Shimizu, Hector A. Duran Limon, Pat Welsh, Sandeep Pattnaik, Anthony Praino, David Villegas, Selim Kalayci, Gargi Dasgupta, Onyeka Ezenwoye, Juan Carlos Martinez, Ivan Rodero, Shuyi Chen, Javier Muñoz, Diego Lopez, Julita Corbalan, Hugh Willoughby, Michael McFail, Christine Lisetti, and Malek Adjouadi. Transparent grid enablement of weather research and forecasting. In Proceedings of the Mardi Gras Conference 2008 - Workshop on Grid-Enabling Applications, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA, January 2008. (accepted for publication.).

• Posters:

  S. Masoud Sadjadi, Javier Muñoz, Diego Lopez, Javier Figueroa, Xabriel J. Collazo-Mojica, Alex Orta, Michael McFailand, David Villegas, Rosa Badia, Pat Welsh, Raju Rangaswami, Shu Shimizu, and Hector A. Duran Limon. Transparent grid enablement of WRF using a profiling, code inspection, and modeling approach. In Poster Presented in the 5th Lating American Grid (LA Grid) Summit, The IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, NY, U.S.A., September 2007.

  S. Masoud Sadjadi, Steve Luis, Khalid Saleem, Donald Llopis, Javier Muñoz, Diego Lopez, Javier Figueroa, David Villegas Castillo, Selim Kalayci, Pat Welsh, Shu-Ching Chen, Anthony Praino, and Hugh Willoughby. The latin american (la) grid weather research and forecast (WRF) portal. In Poster Presented in the 5th Lating American Grid (LA Grid) Summit, The IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, NY, U.S.A., September 2007.

• Technical Reports:

  S. Masoud Sadjadi, David Villegas, Javier Muñoz, Diego Lopez, Alex Orta, Michael McFail, Xabriel J. Collazo-Mojica, and Javier Figueroa. Finding an appropriate profiler for the weather research and forecasting code. Technical Report FIU-SCIS-2007-09-03, School of Computing and Information Sciences, Florida International University, 11200 SW 8th St., Miami, FL 33199, August 2007.

  S. Masoud Sadjadi, Javier Muñoz, Diego Lopez, David Villegas, Javier Figueroa, Xabriel J. Collazo-Mojica, Michael McFail, and Alex Orta. Weather research and forecasting model 2.2 documentation: A step-by-step guide of a model run. Technical Report FIU-SCIS-2007-09-02, School of Computing and Information Sciences, Florida International University, 11200 SW 8th St., Miami, FL 33199, August 2007.