THE DESIGN AND ANALYSIS OF EXPERIMENTS. By Oscar Kempthorne. New York, John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1952. 631 pp. $8.50. This book by a teacher of statistics (as well as a consultant for \"experimenters\") is a comprehensive study of the philosophical background for the statistical design of experiment. It is necessary to have some facility with algebraic notation and manipulation to be able to use the volume intelligently. The problems are presented from the theoretical point of view, without such practical examples as would be helpful for those not acquainted with mathematics. The mathematical justification for the techniques is given. As a somewhat advanced treatment of the design and analysis of experiments, this volume will be interesting and helpful for many who approach statistics theoretically as well as practically. With emphasis on the \"why,\" and with description given broadly, the author relates the subject matter to the general theory of statistics and to the general problem of experimental inference. MARGARET J. ROBERTSON

The Design and Analysis of Experiments

Power dissipation and thermal issues are increasingly significant in modern processors. As a result, it is crucial that power/performance tradeoffs be made more visible to chip architects and even compiler writers, in addition to circuit designers. Most existing power analysis tools achieve high accuracy by calculating power estimates for designs only after layout or floorplanning are complete. In addition to being available only late in the design process, such tools are often quite slow, which compounds the difficulty of running them for a large space of design possibilities.This paper presents Wattch, a framework for analyzing and optimizing microprocessor power dissipation at the architecture-level. Wattch is 1000X or more faster than existing layout-level power tools, and yet maintains accuracy within 10% of their estimates as verified using industry tools on leading-edge designs. This paper presents several validations of Wattch's accuracy. In addition, we present three examples that demonstrate how architects or compiler writers might use Wattch to evaluate power consumption in their design process.We see Wattch as a complement to existing lower-level tools; it allows architects to explore and cull the design space early on, using faster, higher-level tools. It also opens up the field of power-efficient computing to a wider range of researchers by providing a power evaluation methodology within the portable and familiar SimpleScalar framework.

Wattch: a framework for architectural-level power analysis and optimizations

MPI (Message Passing Interface) is a specification for a standard library for message passing that was defined by the MPI Forum, a broadly based group of parallel computer vendors, library writers, and applications specialists. Multiple implementations of MPI have been developed. In this paper, we describe MPICH, unique among existing implementations in its design goal of combining portability with high performance. We document its portability and performance and describe the architecture by which these features are simultaneously achieved. We also discuss the set of tools that accompany the free distribution of MPICH, which constitute the beginnings of a portable parallel programming environment. A project of this scope inevitably imparts lessons about parallel computing, the specification being followed, the current hardware and software environment for parallel computing, and project management; we describe those we have learned. Finally, we discuss future developments for MPICH, including those necessary to accommodate extensions to the MPI Standard now being contemplated by the MPI Forum.

A high-performance, portable implementation of the MPI message passing interface standard

Portable implementation of the mpi message passing interface standard

We have developed Ceph, a distributed file system that provides excellent performance, reliability, and scalability. Ceph maximizes the separation between data and metadata management by replacing allocation tables with a pseudo-random data distribution function (CRUSH) designed for heterogeneous and dynamic clusters of unreliable object storage devices (OSDs). We leverage device intelligence by distributing data replication, failure detection and recovery to semi-autonomous OSDs running a specialized local object file system. A dynamic distributed metadata cluster provides extremely efficient metadata management and seamlessly adapts to a wide range of general purpose and scientific computing file system workloads. Performance measurements under a variety of workloads show that Ceph has excellent I/O performance and scalable metadata management, supporting more than 250,000 metadata operations per second.

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Ceph: a scalable, high-performance distributed file system

Scheduling jobs on the IBM SP2 system and many other distributed-memory MPPs is usually done by giving each job a partition of the machine for its exclusive use. Allocating such partitions in the order in which the jobs arrive (FCFS scheduling) is fair and predictable, but suffers from severe fragmentation, leading to low utilization. This situation led to the development of the EASY scheduler which uses aggressive backfilling: Small jobs are moved ahead to fill in holes in the schedule, provided they do not delay the first job in the queue. We compare this approach with a more conservative approach in which small jobs move ahead only if they do not delay any job in the queue and show that the relative performance of the two schemes depends on the workload. For workloads typical on SP2 systems, the aggressive approach is indeed better, but, for other workloads, both algorithms are similar. In addition, we study the sensitivity of backfilling to the accuracy of the runtime estimates provided by the users and find a very surprising result. Backfilling actually works better when users overestimate the runtime by a substantial factor.

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Utilization, predictability, workloads, and user runtime estimates in scheduling the IBM SP2 with backfilling

The scheduling of jobs on parallel supercomputer is becoming the subject of much research. However, there is concern about the divergence of theory and practice. We review theoretical research in this area, and recommendations based on recent results. This is contrasted with a proposal for standard interfaces among the components of a scheduling system, that has grown from requirements in the field.

Theory and Practice in Parallel Job Scheduling

The workload on parallel supercomputers: modeling the characteristics of rigid jobs

The most commonly used scheduling algorithm for parallel supercomputers is FCFS with backfilling, as originally introduced in the EASY scheduler. Backfilling means that short jobs are allowed to run ahead of their time provided they do not delay previously queued jobs (or at least the first queued job). However, predictions have not been incorporated into production schedulers, partially due to a misconception (that we resolve) claiming inaccuracy actually improves performance, but mainly because underprediction is technically unacceptable: users will not tolerate jobs being killed just because system predictions were too short. We solve this problem by divorcing kill-time from the runtime prediction and correcting predictions adaptively as needed if they are proved wrong. The end result is a surprisingly simple scheduler, which requires minimal deviations from current practices (e.g., using FCFS as the basis) and behaves exactly like EASY as far as users are concerned; nevertheless, it achieves significant improvements in performance, predictability, and accuracy. Notably, this is based on a very simple runtime predictor that just averages the runtimes of the last two jobs by the same user; counter intuitively, our results indicate that using recent data is more important than mining the history for similar jobs. All the techniques suggested in this paper can be used to enhance any backfilling algorithm and are not limited to EASY

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Dror G. Feitelson

Papers

Utilization, predictability, workloads, and user runtime estimates in scheduling the IBM SP2 with backfilling

Theory and Practice in Parallel Job Scheduling

The workload on parallel supercomputers: modeling the characteristics of rigid jobs

Backfilling Using System-Generated Predictions Rather than User Runtime Estimates

Gang scheduling performance benefits for fine-grain synchronization