Miyuru Dayarathna

Design and implementation of distributed and scalable multimedia signage system

Digital signage systems have found many interesting applications in the areas of advertising, entertainment and education. There are a variety of digital signage architectures in use. Through this paper we present Infoshare, a distributed and scalable multimedia signage system. Infoshare is based on the architecture of a collection of autonomous signage players connected with servers via a web service interface. The signage players display XAML based screens with rich signage contents which are scheduled based on location and time. This paper provides an overview of the Infoshare system that is deployed as the news signage system of Graduate School of Media Design, Keio University.

Introducing Acacia-RDF: An X10-Based Scalable Distributed RDF Graph Database Engine

Linked data mining has become one of the key questions in HPC graph mining in recent years. However, the existing RDF database engines are not scalable and are less reliable in heterogeneous clouds. In this paper we describe the design and implementation of Acacia-RDF which is a scalable distributed RDF graph database engine developed with X10 programming language to solve this issue. Acacia-RDF partitions the RDF data sets into subgraphs following vertex cut paradigm. The partitioned data sets are persisted on secondary storage across X10 places. We developed a scalable SPARQL processor for Acacia-RDF which operates on top of partitioned RDF data. Furthermore, we demonstrate the implementation of scalable graph algorithms such as Triangle counting with such partitioned data sets. We present performance results gathered from Acacia with different scales of LUBM RDF benchmark data sets and make a comparison of Acacias performance against Neo4j graph database server. From the scalability experiments conducted upto 16 X10 places, we observed that Acacia-RDF scales well with LUBM data sets. Acacia-RDF reported approximately 2 seconds elapsed time on 4 places for running the first and third queries of the LUBM benchmark on LUBM scale 40 data set. Through this work we introduce the use of X10 language for scalable RDF graph data management.

TelescopeVisualizer: a real-time internet information visualizer with a flexible user interface

Visualizing the Internet activities has been an interesting and challenging research issue. Many successful efforts were concentrated around visualizing a single aspect of the Internet. However such fixed application user interfaces cannot cope with visualizing the diversity of network information and ever changing nature of the Internet. We present TelescopeVisualizer, a scalable real-time Internet information visualizer that allows for querying and visualizing multiple aspects of the Internet interactions. TelescopeVisualizers XAML based flexible user interface avoids tight coupling of visualization application with the rest of the system making it possible to visualize Internet information in realtime. It allows users to upload custom query layouts, post queries and change the visualizations as they require. Using a query traffic generator application, we demonstrate scalability of TelescopeVisualizer system in different hardware platforms.

Latency Aware Elastic Switching-based Stream Processing Over Compressed Data Streams

Elastic scaling of event stream processing systems has gained significant attention recently due to the prevalence of cloud computing technologies. We investigate on the complexities associated with elastic scaling of an event processing system in a private/public cloud scenario. We develop an Elastic Switching Mechanism (ESM) which reduces the overall average latency of event processing jobs by significant amount considering the cost of operating the system. ESM is augmented with adaptive compressing of upstream data. The ESM conducts one of the two types of switching where either part of the data is sent to the public cloud (data switching) or a selected query is sent to the public cloud (query switching) based on the characteristics of the query. We model the operation of the ESM as the function of two binary switching functions. We show that our elastic switching mechanism with compression is capable of handling out-of-order events more efficiently compared to techniques which does not involve compression. We used two application benchmarks called EmailProcessor and a Social Networking Benchmark (SNB2016) to conduct multiple experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of our approach. In a single query deployment with EmailProcessor benchmark we observed that our elastic switching mechanism provides 1.24 seconds average latency improvement per processed event which is 16.70% improvement compared to private cloud only deployment. When presented the option of scaling EmailProcessor with four public cloud VMs ESM further reduced the average latency by 37.55% compared to the single public cloud VM. In a multi-query deployment with both EmailProcessor and SNB2016 we obtained a reduction of average latency of both the queries by 39.61 seconds which is a decrease of 7% of overall latency. These performance figures indicate that our elastic switching mechanism with compressed data streams can effectively reduce the average elapsed time of stream processing happening in private/public clouds.

High-Performance Graph Data Management and Mining in Cloud Environments with X10

Large-scale graph data management and mining in cloud environments have been a widely discussed issue in recent times. The goal and the scope of this chapter is to discuss how X10 (a Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) language) has been applied for programming data-intensive systems. Specifically, we focus on the problem of creating scalable systems for storing and processing large-scale graph data on HPC clouds with X10. The chapter first discusses about large-scale graph processing with X10. Next, it describes the experience of designing and implementing a distributed graph database engine called Acacia with X10. We specifically focus on Acacia’s RDF extension. Finally, it will describe how a graph database benchmarking framework called XGDBench has been developed to analyze the performance of graph database servers. Overall the chapter describes our experiences of implementing such graph-based systems and frameworks with X10.

MEXARC: Media Content Expression Architecture

Information presentation desktop applications such as media players, digital signage players are heavily encountered by us in our daily life. However current presentation oriented desktop application architectures are not flexible and less efficient in presenting a variety of information. Desktop applications rely on embedded files and the contents they present are bound to presentation layout. This paper presents “Media Content Expression Architecture” (MEXARC), a solution for the aforementioned problem. MEXARC uses XML based declarative graphical user interface languages for creating the presentations which provides efficient handling of information compared to legacy presentational architectures. Two software prototypes named Infoshare and Telescope Visualizer were developed based on MEXARC to evaluate its applicability in digital signage systems and information visualizers. Evaluation of MEXARC applications were done considering the aspect of scalability. It was observed that Infoshare web service and Telescope server are scalable in terms of hardware resources. Paper contributes to the area of presentational desktop applications by introducing a novel, scalable and generic smart client software architecture that can be applied in different presentational scenarios. We envision future applications of MEXARC in E-learning, Online Gaming and Television. The paper describes the MEXARC architecture and how it has been applied for the two software prototypes.

Infoshare: Design and Implementation of Scalable Multimedia Signage Architecture for Wireless Ubiquitous Environments

Digital signage systems have found many interesting applications in the realms of advertising, entertainment and education. One of the most prevalent challenging issues faced by current Local Area Network (LAN) based Digital signage network architectures is that their difficulty in porting to wireless ubiquitous environments. While popularity of wireless LANs promotes such architectural improvement, Traditional thin/thick client based architectures suffer inefficiency and scalability issues introduced by use of proprietary signage content formats. Use of such content formats to store signage contents is less optimal since it could lead to content redundancy, difficulty in creating, managing signage contents and scalability issues. As a solution for this issue we propose a Smart Client based digital signage architecture that uses XAML (an XML based declarative GUI language) contents for expressing its signage displays. While Smart Clients can better tolerate communication disruptions which are quite frequent in wireless environments, use of XAML based open content format promotes use of simple tools and variety of devices for signage content creation and management over the Internet in a ubiquitous environment. We successfully applied this generic architecture to a prototype digital signage system called Infoshare and report its robustness in withstanding network disruptions. We evaluate the easiness of editing XAML based signage contents by comparing Infoshare with a popular LAN based digital signage system which uses proprietary content formats. We demonstrate scalability of Infoshare signage service in terms of hardware resources by deploying it in different hardware platforms.

Petimo: children's companion for safe social networking

A novel interactive approach that helps children make friends in safe social networks and reassures parents that their children are protected.

Infoshare: Content, design and system independent multimedia signage architecture

In this paper, we present Infoshare: a flexible and scalable information authoring and sharing architecture for multimedia digital signage systems. Proposed architecture internally analyze and classify content, design and system infrastructure into three different layers using metadata extracted by user input and creates a highly scalable and easy to share digital signage environment. Furthermore, this architecture enables decentralized management by defining different user roles to handle each above mentioned layers. We believe that Infoshare architecture can make an efficient Creation, Distribution and Installation (CDI) cycle for multimedia digital signage content while allowing smooth scalability and management of the system. We applied this architecture to a prototype digital signage system. Paper describes the system implementation, key features and future development directions.