Cloud Computing Lecture #1

What is Cloud Computing?

(and an intro to parallel/distributed processing)

Jimmy Lin
The iSchool
University of Maryland
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Some material adapted from slides by Christophe Bisciglia, Aaron Kimball, & Sierra Michels-Slettvet,
Google Distributed Computing Seminar, 2007 (licensed under Creation Commons Attribution 3.0 License)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States
See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ for details

Source: http://www.free-pictures-photos.com/

What is Cloud Computing?

1.

Web-scale problems

2.

Large data centers

3.

Different models of computing

4.

Highly-interactive Web applications

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1. Web-Scale Problems

Characteristics:

Definitely data-intensive
May also be processing intensive

Examples:

Crawling, indexing, searching, mining the Web

Post-genomics life sciences research
Other scientific data (physics, astronomers, etc.)
Sensor networks
Web 2.0 applications

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How much data?

Wayback Machine has 2 PB + 20 TB/month (2006)

Google processes 20 PB a day (2008)

all words ever spoken by human beings ~ 5 EB

NOAA has ~1 PB climate data (2007)

CERNs LHC will generate 15 PB a year (2008)

640K ought to be
enough for anybody.

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Maximilien Brice, CERN

Maximilien Brice, CERN

Theres nothing like more data!

s/inspiration/data/g;

(Banko and Brill, ACL 2001)

(Brants et al., EMNLP 2007)

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What to do with more data?

Answering factoid questions

Pattern matching on the Web

Works amazingly well
Who shot Abraham Lincoln? X shot Abraham Lincoln

Learning relations

Start with seed instances

Search for patterns on the Web
Using patterns to find more instances
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 - 1791)
Einstein was born in 1879

Birthday-of(Mozart, 1756)
Birthday-of(Einstein, 1879)

PERSON (DATE
PERSON was born in DATE

(Brill et al., TREC 2001; Lin, ACM TOIS 2007)

(Agichtein and Gravano, DL 2000; Ravichandran and Hovy, ACL 2002; )

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2. Large Data Centers

Web-scale problems? Throw more machines at it!

Clear trend: centralization of computing resources in large

data centers

Necessary ingredients: fiber, juice, and space

What do Oregon, Iceland, and abandoned mines have in
common?

Important Issues:

Redundancy
Efficiency
Utilization
Management

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Source: Harpers (Feb, 2008)

Maximilien Brice, CERN

Key Technology: Virtualization

App

App

App

App

App

App

OS

OS

OS

Operating System

Hypervisor

Hardware

Hardware

Traditional Stack

Virtualized Stack

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3. Different Computing Models

Why do it yourself if you can pay someone to do it for you?

Utility computing

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Why buy machines when you can rent cycles?

Examples: Amazons EC2, GoGrid, AppNexus

Give me nice API and take care of the implementation

Example: Google App Engine

Software as a Service (SaaS)

Just run it for me!

Example: Gmail

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4. Web Applications

A mistake on top of a hack built on sand held together by

duct tape?

What is the nature of software applications?

From the desktop to the browser

SaaS == Web-based applications
Examples: Google Maps, Facebook

How do we deliver highly-interactive Web-based

applications?

AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML)

For better, or for worse

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What is the course about?

MapReduce: the back-end of cloud computing

Ajax: the front-end of cloud computing

Batch-oriented processing of large datasets

Highly-interactive Web-based applications

Computing in the clouds

Amazons EC2/S3 as an example of utility computing

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Amazon Web Services

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Simple Storage Service (S3)

Rent computing resources by the hour

Basic unit of accounting = instance-hour
Additional costs for bandwidth

Persistent storage
Charge by the GB/month
Additional costs for bandwidth

Youll be using EC2/S3 for course assignments!

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This course is not for you

If youre not genuinely interested in the topic

If youre not ready to do a lot of programming

If youre not open to thinking about computing in new ways

If you cant cope with uncertainly, unpredictability, poor

documentation, and immature software

If you cant put in the time

Otherwise, this will be a richly rewarding course!

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Source: http://davidzinger.wordpress.com/2007/05/page/2/

Cloud Computing Zen

Dont get frustrated (take a deep breath)

Be patient

This is the second first time Ive taught this course

Be flexible

This is bleeding edge technology

Those W$*#T@F! moments

There will be unanticipated issues along the way

Be constructive

Tell me how I can make everyones experience better

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Source: Wikipedia

Source: Wikipedia

Source: Wikipedia

Source: Wikipedia

Things to go over

Course schedule

Assignments and deliverables

Amazon EC2/S3

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Web-Scale Problems?

Dont hold your breath:

Biocomputing
Nanocomputing
Quantum computing

It all boils down to

Divide-and-conquer
Throwing more hardware at the problem

Simple to understand a lifetime to master

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Divide and Conquer

Work

Partition

w1

w2

w3

worker

worker

worker

r1

r2

r3

Result

Combine

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Different Workers

Different threads in the same core

Different cores in the same CPU

Different CPUs in a multi-processor system

Different machines in a distributed system

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Choices, Choices, Choices

Commodity vs. exotic hardware

Number of machines vs. processor vs. cores

Bandwidth of memory vs. disk vs. network

Different programming models

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Flynns Taxonomy

Single (SD)
Multiple (MD)

Data

Instructions
Single (SI)

Multiple (MI)

SISD

MISD

Single-threaded
process

Pipeline
architecture

SIMD

MIMD

Vector Processing

Multi-threaded
Programming

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SISD

Processor
D

Instructions

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SIMD
Processor
D0

D0

D0

D0

D0

D0

D0

D1

D1

D1

D1

D1

D1

D1

D2

D2

D2

D2

D2

D2

D2

D3

D3

D3

D3

D3

D3

D3

D4

D4

D4

D4

D4

D4

D4

Dn

Dn

Dn

Dn

Dn

Dn

Dn

Instructions

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MIMD
Processor
D

Instructions
Processor
D

Instructions

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Memory Typology: Shared

Processor

Processor
Memory

Processor

Processor

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Memory Typology: Distributed

Processor

Memory

Processor

Memory

Network

Processor

Memory

Processor

Memory

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Memory Typology: Hybrid

Processor

Processor
Memory

Processor

Memory
Processor
Network

Processor

Processor
Memory

Processor

Memory
Processor

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Parallelization Problems

How do we assign work units to workers?

What if we have more work units than workers?

What if workers need to share partial results?

How do we aggregate partial results?

How do we know all the workers have finished?

What if workers die?

What is the common theme of all of these problems?

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General Theme?

Parallelization problems arise from:

Communication between workers

Access to shared resources (e.g., data)

Thus, we need a synchronization system!

This is tricky:

Finding bugs is hard

Solving bugs is even harder

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Managing Multiple Workers

Difficult because

Thus, we need:

Semaphores (lock, unlock)

Conditional variables (wait, notify, broadcast)
Barriers

Still, lots of problems:

(Often) dont know the order in which workers run

(Often) dont know where the workers are running
(Often) dont know when workers interrupt each other

Deadlock, livelock, race conditions, ...

Moral of the story: be careful!

Even trickier if the workers are on different machines

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Patterns for Parallelism

Parallel computing has been around for decades

Here are some design patterns

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Master/Slaves

master

slaves

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Producer/Consumer Flow

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Work Queues

P
P
P

shared queue
W W W W W

C
C
C

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Rubber Meets Road

From patterns to implementation:

The reality:

pthreads, OpenMP for multi-threaded programming

MPI for clustering computing

Lots of one-off solutions, custom code

Write you own dedicated library, then program with it
Burden on the programmer to explicitly manage everything

MapReduce to the rescue!

(for next time)

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