Private:progress-hegazy

Sep 24-28

PCIe Project

• Accomplished (this week)
  • I registered the paper abstract in IPDPS.
  • I ported the paper to LaTeX and worked on the abstract, introduction, related work and problem definition.
  • Ahmed's code now works with most TCP clients and servers.
• Issues
  • We are running the experiments now (Friday night) and time is tight for the IPDPS submission.
• Next Steps
  • We will finish as much experiments as we can Friday and Saturday.
  • I should have the paper (almost) ready Saturday night.

HPC Storage

• Accomplished (this week)
  • I had a couple of meetings with Abdullah; he came up with some file access logs from a benchmark
  • We ran the partial autocorrelation function on it to get the Markov order.
  • I up with a rough state definition based on the requested blocks (or rather "chunks") and storage status. I also came up with a rough definition for the reward/penalty function based on the same info.
• Issues
  • Progress is a bit slow, but not too bad.
• Next Steps
  • Abdullah is to get more logs from other real HPC applications
  • I will continue to define the Markov Decision Process.

Industrial Automation as a Service

• Accomplished (this week)
  • I had a couple of meetings with Ahmed where I explained to him in more details what experiments to run.
  • Ahmed prepared the testbed based on new cloud instances. He is very close to getting the results.
  • I had a Skype call with Ali to explain to him almost the same thing as Ahmed, though Ali is a little behind Ahmed.
• Issues
  • Progress is a bit too slow; we could have easily obtained results this week, but we didn't.
• Next Steps
  • Ahmed should come up with the results soon.
  • More experiments (this time, on random delay) are to be conducted.
  • Ali should be able to run the same experiments soon (just to get familiar; nothing new to accomplish).

Sep 17-21

PCIe Project

• Accomplished (this week)
  • Ahmed bought and successfully installed the Infiniband cards.
  • Benchmark experiments were run for Infiniband.
• Issues
  • Ahmed's implementation of SDP doesn't support asynchronous calls.
  • Ahmed couldn't run PCIe and Infiniband experiments from the same machine (library conflict between his SDP and Infiniband SDP)
  • Time is tight for the IPDPS submission.
• Next Steps
  • Ahmed will implement asynchronous call support in order to run his application-based evaluation and compare it to Infiniband.
  • I will register the paper's abstract to IPDPS over the weekend (deadline is Monday, Sept 24th).
  • Although the time is tight, Ahmed will try to finish his asynchronous calls support and the application-based evaluation by the end of next week. This gives us a couple of days to polish up the paper.

HPC Storage

• Accomplished (this week)
  • Abdullah tried to obtain HPC I/O logs off of the internet. When that was not possible, he tried a couple of benchmarks to to generate some I/O logs as a placeholder until we obtain logs from real HPC applications.
  • During our meeting, we tried to analyze the data, e.g., to verify the Markov chain order using partial autocorrelation functions. I noticed the data was so fine-grained (time in nanoseconds and block size in KB).
• Issues
  • None
• Next Steps
  • Abdullah to work on the coarser representation of the log (e.g., 1 second and MBs).
  • I will go into one more level of details for the general methodology.

Industrial Automation as a Service

• Accomplished (this week)
  • I have come up with the delay compensation results and updated the working document.
  • I have met with Ahmed AbdelSadek and explained the problem and experiments to him.
  • Ali finished his first experiment, which is nothing other than making sure Modbus is working fine for him on LabVIEW.
• Issues
  • Ahmed was supposed to finish his first task by the end of the week, but he was "discussing some issues with Dr. Mohamed regarding [his] research".
  • Communication rate with Ali is a bit slow.
• Next Steps
  • I may have to work on the delay experiments myself until Ahmed is up to speed.
  • Ahmed will try to accomplish the tasks rolled over from this week.
  • I will have conference call with Ali to explain to him the next steps.

Oct 1-5

PCIe Project

• Accomplished (this week)
  • Ahmed came up with results on application-level testing using Apache-wget.
  • I have finished up writing the IPDPS paper and sent it for Dr. Hefeeda to review.
  • I have addressed at least 80% of Dr. Hefeeda's comments and submitted the paper to IPDPS.
• Issues
  • None
• Next Steps
  • Ahmed is working on updating his report and writing his thesis.
  • I have some leftover comments that I will need to address in the paper.

HPC Storage

• Accomplished (this week)
  • Abdullah came up with I/O logs from the benchmark.
  • During a one-on-one, I ran partial auto-correlation function (PACF) on the log, and the result is a first-order Markov Chain.
• Issues
  • None
• Next Steps
  • Abdullah will come up with logs with the same format from HPC applications.
  • We will start working on defining our state space, action space, and reward/penalty function.

Industrial Automation as a Service

• Accomplished (this week)
  • Ahmed successfully ran the delay experiments and obtained results.
  • I asked for additional experiments for a different scan cycle, which Ahmed ran on the spot!
  • The results show great robustness for up to 6.4 seconds of round-trip delay.
• Issues
  • None
• Next Steps
  • Ahmed will run an experiment for dual redundancy.
  • I am about to decide on the delay estimator to feed Smith Predictor (for variable delay cases).