Ata Turk

Architecture of a grid-enabled Web search engine

Search Engine for South-East Europe (SE4SEE) is a socio-cultural search engine running on the grid infrastructure. It offers a personalized, on-demand, country-specific, category-based Web search facility. The main goal of SE4SEE is to attack the page freshness problem by performing the search on the original pages residing on the Web, rather than on the previously fetched copies as done in the traditional search engines. SE4SEE also aims to obtain high download rates in Web crawling by making use of the geographically distributed nature of the grid. In this work, we present the architectural design issues and implementation details of this search engine. We conduct various experiments to illustrate performance results obtained on a grid infrastructure and justify the use of the search strategy employed in SE4SEE.

Temporal Workload-Aware Replicated Partitioning for Social Networks

Most frequent and expensive queries in social networks involve multi-user operations such as requesting the latest tweets or news-feeds of friends. The performance of such queries are heavily dependent on the data partitioning and replication methodologies adopted by the underlying systems. Existing solutions for data distribution in these systems involve hashor graph-based approaches that ignore the multi-way relations among data. In this work, we propose a novel data partitioning and selective replication method that utilizes the temporal information in prior workloads to predict future query patterns. Our method utilizes the social network structure and the temporality of the interactions among its users to construct a hypergraph that correctly models multi-user operations. It then performs simultaneous partitioning and replication of this hypergraph to reduce the query span while respecting load balance and I/O load constraints under replication. To test our model, we enhance the Cassandra NoSQL system to support selective replication and we implement a social network application (a Twitter clone) utilizing our enhanced Cassandra. We conduct experiments on a cloud computing environment (Amazon EC2) to test the developed systems. Comparison of the proposed method with hash- and enhanced graph-based schemes indicate that it significantly improves latency and throughput.

Site-Based Partitioning and Repartitioning Techniques for Parallel PageRank Computation

The PageRank algorithm is an important component in effective web search. At the core of this algorithm are repeated sparse matrix-vector multiplications where the involved web matrices grow in parallel with the growth of the web and are stored in a distributed manner due to space limitations. Hence, the PageRank computation, which is frequently repeated, must be performed in parallel with high-efficiency and low-preprocessing overhead while considering the initial distributed nature of the web matrices. Our contributions in this work are twofold. We first investigate the application of state-of-the-art sparse matrix partitioning models in order to attain high efficiency in parallel PageRank computations with a particular focus on reducing the preprocessing overhead they introduce. For this purpose, we evaluate two different compression schemes on the web matrix using the site information inherently available in links. Second, we consider the more realistic scenario of starting with an initially distributed data and extend our algorithms to cover the repartitioning of such data for efficient PageRank computation. We report performance results using our parallelization of a state-of-the-art PageRank algorithm on two different PC clusters with 40 and 64 processors. Experiments show that the proposed techniques achieve considerably high speedups while incurring a preprocessing overhead of several iterations (for some instances even less than a single iteration) of the underlying sequential PageRank algorithm.

Replicated partitioning for undirected hypergraphs

Hypergraph partitioning (HP) and replication are diverse but powerful tools that are traditionally applied separately to minimize the costs of parallel and sequential systems that access related data or process related tasks. When combined together, these two techniques have the potential of achieving significant improvements in performance of many applications. In this study, we provide an approach involving a tool that simultaneously performs replication and partitioning of the vertices of an undirected hypergraph whose vertices represent data and nets represent task dependencies among these data. In this approach, we propose an iterative-improvement-based replicated bipartitioning heuristic, which is capable of move, replication, and unreplication of vertices. In order to utilize our replicated bipartitioning heuristic in a recursive bipartitioning framework, we also propose appropriate cut-net removal, cut-net splitting, and pin selection algorithms to correctly encapsulate the two most commonly used cutsize metrics. We embed our replicated bipartitioning scheme into the state-of-the-art multilevel HP tool PaToH to provide an effective and efficient replicated HP tool, rpPaToH. The performance of the techniques proposed and the tools developed is tested over the undirected hypergraphs that model the communication costs of parallel query processing in information retrieval systems. Our experimental analysis indicates that the proposed technique provides significant improvements in the quality of the partitions, especially under low replication ratios.

Selective Replicated Declustering for Arbitrary Queries

Data declustering is used to minimize query response times in data intensive applications. In this technique, query retrieval process is parallelized by distributing the data among several disks and it is useful in applications such as geographic information systems that access huge amounts of data. Declustering with replication is an extension of declustering with possible data replicas in the system. Many replicated declustering schemes have been proposed. Most of these schemes generate two or more copies of all data items. However, some applications have very large data sizes and even having two copies of all data items may not be feasible. In such systems selective replication is a necessity. Furthermore, existing replication schemes are not designed to utilize query distribution information if such information is available. In this study we propose a replicated declustering scheme that decides both on the data items to be replicated and the assignment of all data items to disks when there is limited replication capacity. We make use of available query information in order to decide replication and partitioning of the data and try to optimize aggregate parallel response time. We propose and implement a Fiduccia-Mattheyses-like iterative improvement algorithm to obtain a two-way replicated declustering and use this algorithm in a recursive framework to generate a multi-way replicated declustering. Experiments conducted with arbitrary queries on real datasets show that, especially for low replication constraints, the proposed scheme yields better performance results compared to existing replicated declustering schemes.

Data-Parallel Web Crawling Models ?

The need to quickly locate, gather, and store the vast amount of material in the Web necessitates parallel computing. In this paper, we propose two models, based on multi-constraint graph-partitioning, for efficient data-parallel Web crawling. The models aim to balance the amount of data downloaded and stored by each processor as well as balancing the number of page requests made by the processors. The models also minimize the total volume of communication during the link exchange between the processors. To evaluate the performance of the models, experimental results are presented on a sample Web repository containing around 915,000 pages.

Query-Log Aware Replicated Declustering

Data declustering and replication can be used to reduce I/O times related with processing of data intensive queries. Declustering parallelizes the query retrieval process by distributing the data items requested by queries among several disks. Replication enables alternative disk choices for individual disk items and thus provides better query parallelism options. In general, existing replicated declustering schemes do not consider query log information and try to optimize all possible queries for a specific query type, such as range or spatial queries. In such schemes, it is assumed that two or more copies of all data items are to be generated and scheduling of these copies to disks are discussed. However, in some applications, generation of even two copies of all of the data items is not feasible, since data items tend to have very large sizes. In this work, we assume that there is a given limit on disk capacities and thus on replication amounts. We utilize existing query-log information to propose a selective replicated declustering scheme, in which we select the data items to be replicated and decide on their scheduling onto disks while respecting disk capacities. We propose and implement an iterative improvement algorithm to obtain a two-way replicated declustering and use this algorithm in a recursive framework to generate a multiway replicated declustering. Then we improve the obtained multiway replicated declustering by efficient refinement heuristics. Experiments conducted on realistic data sets show that the proposed scheme yields better performance results compared to existing replicated declustering schemes.

A Parallel Framework for In-Memory Construction of Term-Partitioned Inverted Indexes

With the advances in cloud computing and huge RAMs provided by 64-bit architectures, it is possible to tackle large problems using memory-based solutions. Construction of term-based, partitioned, parallel inverted indexes is a communication intensive task and suitable for memory-based modeling. In this paper, we provide an efficient parallel framework for in-memory construction of term-based partitioned, inverted indexes. We show that, by utilizing an efficient bucketing scheme, we can eliminate the need for the generation of a global vocabulary. We propose and investigate assignment schemes that can reduce the communication overheads while minimizing the storage and final query processing imbalance. We also present a study on how communication among processors should be carried out with limited communication memory in order to reduce the total inversion time. We present several different communication-memory organizations and discuss their advantages and shortcomings. The conducted experiments indicate promising results.

Investigation of load balancing scalability in space plasma simulations

In this study we report the load-balancing performance issues that are observed during the petascaling of a space plasma simulation code developed at the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI). The code models the communication pattern as a hypergraph, and partitions the computational grid using the parallel hypergraph partitioning scheme (PHG) of the Zoltan partitioning framework. The result of partitioning determines the distribution of grid cells to processors. It is observed that the initial partitioning and data distribution phases take a substantial percentage of the overall computation time. Alternative (graph-partitioning-based) schemes that provide better balance are investigated. Comparisons in terms of effect on running time and load-balancing quality are presented. Test results on Juelich BlueGene/P cluster are reported.

Memory Resident Parallel Inverted Index Construction

Advances in cloud computing, 64-bit architectures and huge RAMs enable performing many search related tasks in memory.We argue that term-based partitioned parallel inverted index construction is among such tasks, and provide an efficient parallel framework that achieves this task. We show that by utilizing an efficient bucketing scheme we can eliminate the need for the generation of a global index and reduce the communication overhead without disturbing balancing constraint. We also propose and investigate assignment schemes that can further reduce communication overheads without disturbing balancing constraints. The conducted experiments indicate promising results.