Private:progress-aldhamin

Summer 2012

• Courses: none
• Working on my research...

June'12

• Report : [1]
• June 21: I compared available Linux tools and I believe that collectl is the best to serve our need. The tool is very powerful and can even graph the data directly, but that will limit our ability to playback and message raw data again. Now I'm waiting for the approval from application support @ Aramco to add it in the job script. Hopefully I can get an answer very soon.
• June 18: Learning about "collectl", "sar" and "ganglia" Linux tools for system I/O logs. I need root/sudo access into my Linux machine to be able to install and test each one of them.
• June 11: We experimented few Linux tools together on some benchmarks to see if we will be able to get some useful data. I think we do. But, my colleague at Saudi Aramco, who's working with me, is out of office for few days attending ICS12 in Hamburg, Germany. Because the clusters are not exposed to public network, I cannot have access to them remotely and so I'll have to wait for him to comeback to resume the work.

• I've been in close contact with Expec Computer Center (ECC) to collect I/O data about the application. We're facing some technical challenges to achieve this. First, the application's clusters are connected to two different high performance storage filers (Panasas and NetAppGX). When trying to collect data from the filers side we cannot tell which job is the owner of a particular I/O operation. That said, we've been trying find an alternative way to collect the data from the node side such that we automate it in the job script, so all nodes participate and will have a file of stats at the end of the jobs that can be correlated , manipulated. Linux provides several tools that can help on this but we want the least expensive (i.e. it has a minimal affect the performance of the running job). I'm working with my colleagues there from both HPC and Data Storage teams on the task.
• Learning and practising Intel Open Storage toolkit.
• learning and practising blktrace tool.

May'12

• Report: [2]
• Doing a final review of the "Hystor" paper and organizing my thoughts

Spring 2012

• Courses:
  • CMPT 781: Technical Communication
  • CMPT 886: Special Topics in Operating Systems

March'12

• Report: [3]
• Working on my 886 project and there is a high chance for a conference publication.

February'12

• Report: [4]
• Summarized common problems in SSD-based applications.
• Working on my 886 term project.
• Submitted the final draft and my talk to ISMS'12 committee. My paper was accepted in the conference, which took place between Feb 8 - 10.

January'12

• Report: [5]
• Continued my survey into more researches to get a wider horizon into classifying the studies on this prospect.
• I'm reading about the impact of PCI Express and phase-change memory on this field.
• I will utilize my research on the 781 course requirement to utilize the time for both.
• I'm still having difficulty reading papers (in terms of the time it takes to completely finishing a paper) but it's improving with time considering that both courses I'm taken this semester do have a considerable amount of readings of that type.

Fall 2011

• Courses:
  • CMPT-705: Design and Analysis of Algorithms
  • CMPT 880: Programming Parallel and Distributed Systems

November 14

• Report (No updates): [6]
• No progress regarding the research. Courses are consuming all the time I have!!

October 11

• Report (No major updates): [7]
• Still working on a separate report for each of the problems listed on the progress report.

September 22

• Continuing the research on various topics of flash memory and high performance computing.
• Five (5) general ideas have been listed.