Hewlett-Packard

About: Hewlett-Packard is a company organization based out in Palo Alto, California, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Signal & Layer (electronics). The organization has 34663 authors who have published 59808 publications receiving 1467218 citations. The organization is also known as: Hewlett Packard & Hewlett-Packard Company.

SkewTune: mitigating skew in mapreduce applications

Abstract: We present an automatic skew mitigation approach for user-defined MapReduce programs and present SkewTune, a system that implements this approach as a drop-in replacement for an existing MapReduce implementation. There are three key challenges: (a) require no extra input from the user yet work for all MapReduce applications, (b) be completely transparent, and (c) impose minimal overhead if there is no skew. The SkewTune approach addresses these challenges and works as follows: When a node in the cluster becomes idle, SkewTune identifies the task with the greatest expected remaining processing time. The unprocessed input data of this straggling task is then proactively repartitioned in a way that fully utilizes the nodes in the cluster and preserves the ordering of the input data so that the original output can be reconstructed by concatenation. We implement SkewTune as an extension to Hadoop and evaluate its effectiveness using several real applications. The results show that SkewTune can significantly reduce job runtime in the presence of skew and adds little to no overhead in the absence of skew.

A large-scale study of the evolution of web pages

Abstract: How fast does the web change? Does most of the content remain unchanged once it has been authored, or are the documents continuously updated? Do pages change a little or a lot? Is the extent of change correlated to any other property of the page? All of these questions are of interest to those who mine the web, including all the popular search engines, but few studies have been performed to date to answer them.One notable exception is a study by Cho and Garcia-Molina, who crawled a set of 720,000 pages on a daily basis over four months, and counted pages as having changed if their MD5 checksum changed. They found that 40% of all web pages in their set changed within a week, and 23% of those pages that fell into the .com domain changed daily.This paper expands on Cho and Garcia-Molina's study, both in terms of coverage and in terms of sensitivity to change. We crawled a set of 150,836,209 HTML pages once every week, over a span of 11 weeks. For each page, we recorded a checksum of the page, and a feature vector of the words on the page, plus various other data such as the page length, the HTTP status code, etc. Moreover, we pseudo-randomly selected 0.1% of all of our URLs, and saved the full text of each download of the corresponding pages.After completion of the crawl, we analyzed the degree of change of each page, and investigated which factors are correlated with change intensity. We found that the average degree of change varies widely across top-level domains, and that larger pages change more often and more severely than smaller ones.This paper describes the crawl and the data transformations we performed on the logs, and presents some statistical observations on the degree of change of different classes of pages.

KofamKOALA: KEGG ortholog assignment based on profile HMM and adaptive score threshold

Abstract: Summary KofamKOALA is a web server to assign KEGG Orthologs (KOs) to protein sequences by homology search against a database of profile hidden Markov models (KOfam) with pre-computed adaptive score thresholds. KofamKOALA is faster than existing KO assignment tools with its accuracy being comparable to the best performing tools. Function annotation by KofamKOALA helps linking genes to KEGG resources such as the KEGG pathway maps and facilitates molecular network reconstruction. Availability KofamKOALA, KofamScan, and KOfam are freely available from https://www.genome.jp/tools/kofamkoala/ Contact ogata@kuicr.kyoto-u.ac.jp

System and method for performing flexible workflow process compensation in a distributed workflow management system

Abstract: A system and method for performing flexible workflow process execution in a distributed workflow management system is described. The distributed workflow management system is formed by a computer network comprising a plurality of computers. Each computer has a processor, memory and input/output facilities. A workflow process management system operates on one or more of the computers to control the computer network in executing the workflow process. The workflow process includes at least one sequence of multiple actions. A plurality of resources is coupled to respective ones of the computers to carry out the multiple actions. A plurality of state machines are stored as computer-operable code in at least one memory and include a plurality of states interconnected by arcs logically forming a directed graph. The workflow management system further includes logic for instantiating each action with one state and logic for executing the logical sequence of the action as state transitions in each state machine.

Savannah: mobile gaming and learning?

Abstract: This paper reports a study that attempts to explore how using mobile technologies in direct physical interaction with space and with other players can be combined with principles of engagement and self-motivation to create a powerful and engaging learning experience We developed a mobile gaming experience designed to encourage the development of children's conceptual understanding of animal behaviour Ten children (five boys and five girls) aged between 11 and 12 years played and explored the game The findings from this study offer interesting insights into the extent to which mobile gaming might be employed as a tool for supporting learning It also highlights a number of major challenges that this format raises for the organisation of learning within schools and the design of such resources