Jonathan Martí

Dataclay: A distributed data store for effective inter-player data sharing

Abstract In the Big Data era, both the academic community and industry agree that a crucial point to obtain the maximum benefits from the explosive data growth is integrating information from different sources, and also combining methodologies to analyze and process it . For this reason, sharing data so that third parties can build new applications or services based on it is nowadays a trend . Although most data sharing initiatives are based on public data, the ability to reuse data generated by private companies is starting to gain importance as some of them (such as Google, Twitter, BBC or New York Times) are providing access to part of their data. However, current solutions for sharing data with third parties are not fully convenient to either or both data owners and data consumers. Therefore we present dataClay , a distributed data store designed to share data with external players in a secure and flexible way based on the concepts of identity and encapsulation. We also prove that dataClay is comparable in terms of performance with trendy NoSQL technologies while providing extra functionality, and resolves impedance mismatch issues based on the Object Oriented paradigm for data representation.

FaTLease: scalable fault-tolerant lease negotiation with Paxos

A lease is a token which grants its owner exclusive access to a resource for a defined span of time. In order to be able to tolerate failures, leases need to be coordinated by distributed processes. We present FaTLease, an algorithm for fault-tolerant lease negotiation in distributed systems. It is built on the Paxos algorithm for distributed consensus, but avoids Paxos’ main performance bottleneck of requiring persistent state. This property makes our algorithm particularly useful for applications that can not dispense any disk bandwidth. Our experiments show that FaTLease scales up to tens of thousands of concurrent leases and can negotiate thousands of leases per second in both LAN and WAN environments.

Fusing Storage and Computing for the Domain of Business Intelligence and Analytics -- Research Opportunities

With the growing importance of external and shared data, the set of requirements for Business Intelligence and Analytics (BIA) is shifting. Current solutions still come with shortcomings, esp. In multi-stakeholder environments where sensitive content is exchanged. We argue that a new level in the evolution of BIA can be unlocked by tearing down the barriers between storage and computing based on upcoming storage technologies. In particular, we propose a revitalization of ideas from object-oriented databases. We present results from a joint project that aimed at delineating design options for BIA solutions built upon this idea. The paper outlines the interplay of various architectural layers from storage to business with an object-oriented platform at its core. By doing so, we mark the way for further research, outline a novel design of BIA solutions, and illustrate the consequences of low-level infrastructure innovations on the business layer.

Increasing parallelism for workflows in the grid

Workflow applications executed in Grid environments are not able to take advantage of all the potential parallelism they might have. This limitation in the usage of parallelism comes from the fact that when there is a producer/consumer situation communicating using files, the consumer does not start its execution till the producer has finished creating the file to be consumed, and the file has been copied to the consumer (if needed). In this paper, we propose a publish/subscribe mechanism that allows consumers to read the file at the same time it is being produced. In addition, this mechanism is implemented in a transparent way to the application, so does not require any special feature from the local filesystems. Finally, we show that our mechanisms can speedup applications significantly. In our best test we divided by two the execution time of some applications, but other applications may have even higher benefits.