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This paper deals with one of the fundamental properties of grid computing – transferring code between grid nodes and executing it remotely on heterogeneous hosts. Contemporary middleware relies for this purpose on Web Services, which makes application programs complicated and low-level and requires much additional expertise from programmers. We compare two mechanisms for grid application programming with regard to their handling of code transfer – the de-facto standard WS-GRAM in Globus and the higher-level approach based on HOCs (Higher-Order Components). We study the advantages and problems of each approach using a real-world application case study – the sequent alignment problem from bioinformatics. Our experiments show the trade-off between reduced development costs and software complexity when HOCs are used and the higher performance of the applications on the grid when using WS-GRAM.
This work integrates two distinct research areas of parallel and distributed computing, (1) automatic loop parallelization, and (2) component-based Grid programming. The latter includes technologies developed within CoreGRID for simplifying Grid programming: the Grid ComponentModel (GCM) and Higher- Order Components (HOCs). Components support developing applications on the Grid without taking all the technical details of the particular platform type into account (network communication, heterogeneity, etc.). The GCMenables a hierarchical composition of programpieces and HOCs enable the reuse of component code in the development of new applications by specifying application-specific operations in a program via code parameters. When a programmer is provided, e. g., with a compute farm HOC, only the independent worker tasks must be described. But, once an application exhibits data or control dependences, the trivial farm is no longer sufficient. Here, the power of loop parallelization tools, like LooPo, comes into play: by embedding LooPo into a HOC, we show that these two technologies in combination facilitate the automatic transformation of a sequential loop nest with complex dependences (supplied by the user as a HOC parameter) into an ordered task graph, which can be processed on the Grid in parallel. This technique can significantly simplify GCM-based systems which combine multiple HOCs and other components. We use an equation system solver based on the successive overrelaxation method (SOR) as our motivating application example and for performance experiments.
Computational grids combine computers in the Internet for distributed data processing and are an attractive platform for the data-intensive applications of bioinformatics. We present an extensible genome processing software for the grid and evaluate its performance. Our software was able to discover previously unknown circular permutations (CP) in the ProDom database containing more than 70MB of protein data. A specific feature of our software is its design as a component: the Alignment HOC, a Higher-Order Component that makes use of the latest Globus toolkit as grid middleware. Besides genome data, the Alignment HOC accepts plugin code for processing this data as its input, and contains all the required configuration to run the component on top of Globus, thus, freeing the non-grid-expert user from dealing with grid middleware. Instead of writing data distribution procedures and configuring the middleware appropriately for every new algorithm, Alignment HOC users reuse the existing component and only write application-specific plugins. To maintain plugins persistently in a reusable manner, we built a web-accessible plugin database with a comfortable administration GUI. The flexible component-based implementation makes it easy to study CPs in other databases (e.g. UniProt/Swiss-Prot) or to use an alignment algorithm different than the standard Needleman-Wunsch. For the efficient distribution of workload, we developed a library of group communication operations for HOCs.
We suggest that parallel software components used for grid computing should be adaptable to application-specific requirements, instead of developing new components from scratch for each particular application. As an example, we take a parallel farm component which is “embarrassingly parallel”, i. e., free of dependencies, and adapt it to the wavefront processing pattern with dependencies that impact its behavior. We describe our approach in the context of Higher-Order Components (HOCs), with the Java-based system Lithium as our implementation framework. The adaptation process relies on HOCs’ mobile code parameters that are shipped over the network of the grid. We describe our implementation of the proposed component adaptation method and report first experimental results for a particular grid application — the alignment of DNA sequence pairs, a popular, time-critical problem in computational molecular biology.
While high-level software components simplify the programming of grid applications and Web services increase their interoperability, developing such components and configuring the interconnecting services is a demanding task. In this paper, we consider the combination of Higher-Order Components (HOCs) with the Fractal component model and the ProActive library.
HOCs are parallel programming components, made accessible on the grid via Web services that use a special class loader enabling code mobility: executable code can be uploaded to a HOC, allowing one to customize the HOC. Fractal simplifies the composition of components and the ProActive library offers a generator for automatically creating Web services from components composed with Fractal, as long as all the parameters of these services have primitive types.
Taking all the advantages of HOCs, ProActive and Fractal together, the obvious conclusion is that composing HOCs using Fractal and automatically exposing them as Web services on the grid via ProActive minimizes the required efforts for building complex grid systems. In this context, we solved the problem of exchanging code-carrying parameters in automatically generated Web services by integrating the HOC class loading mechanism into the ProActive library.
This paper deals with the problem of application programming for grid systems that combine heterogeneous data and computational resources via the Internet. We argue that grid programming is still too complex because of the big gap between the currently used and anticipated grid middleware, (e.g., Globus or WSRF) and the application level. We suggest that this gap needs to be closed in future-generation grids and propose a novel approach to bridging the gap by using Higher-Order Components (HOCs) — recurring patterns of parallel behaviour that are provided to the user as program building blocks with pre-packaged implementation and middleware setup. The presentation is illustrated with a simple case study of computing fractal images. Our experiments demonstrate that HOCs can simplify grid application programming significantly, without serious performance loss.
Skeletons are common patterns of parallelism, such as farm and pipeline, that can be abstracted and offered to the application programmer as programming primitives. We describe the use and implementation of skeletons on emerging computational grids, with the skeleton system Lithium, based on Java and RMI, as our reference programming syttem. Our main contribution is the exploration of optimization techniques for implementing skeletons on grids based on an optimized, future-based RMI mechanism, which we integrate into the macro-dataflow evaluation mechanism of Lithium. We discuss three optimizations: 1) a lookahead mechanism that allows to process multiple tasks concurrently at each grid server and thereby increases the overall degree of parallelism, 2) a lazy taskbinding technique that reduces interactions between grid servers and the task dispatcher, and 3) dynamic improvements that optimize the collecting of results and the work-load balancing. We report experimental results that demonstrate the improvements due to our optimizations on various testbeds, including a heterogeneous grid-like environment.
Safe and reliable multi-core technology becomes more and more important in the field of embedded systems. Today’s and future embedded systems require increasing performance while being more energy efficient. Moreover, the functional safety for these embedded systems has to be improved or developed completely new. In this chapter, we first address the challenges of embedded multi-core real-time systems. To raise the resilience of such systems we use the deadlock-free synchronization model of Block et al. (A flexible real-time locking protocol for multiprocessors. 2012 IEEE international conference on embedded and real-time computing systems and applications, vol 0, pp 47–56, 2007). The metric mean Normalized Blocking Time (mNBT) is hereby used to measure the timing effects of the blocking behavior of strongly interacting tasks. In a second step, we present a model-based approach to map the tasks of an embedded real-time system to the cores of a multi-core processor. Moreover, we derive an execution time model from runtime measurements of software functions. This information is then used to perform precise probabilistic simulations of different task-to-core mappings and evaluate them with regard to task response times, inter-task blocking overhead and load distribution. Subsequently, we integrate the probabilistic simulation within an optimization technique to systematically improve the task-to-core mapping. We conclude with a case-study, where we demonstrate the effectiveness of the presented approach by optimizing the task-to-core mapping of a practical automotive powertrain system.
Drei Veränderungen charakterisieren den demografischen Wandel in Deutschland: steigende durchschnittliche Lebenserwartung, der Anteil der Alten und Hochbetagten wächst und der Anteil der jüngeren Generationen schrumpft. Konsequenzen sind ein Zuwachs chronisch-degenerativer und pflegeintensiver Erkrankungen, ein schrumpfendes Arbeitskräftepotenzial und vor der Überlastung stehende soziale Sicherungssysteme. Abhilfe soll durch verstärkten Technikeinsatz in der Pflege, insbesondere durch Roboter, geleistet werden: Roboter sollen Pflegekräfte ergänzen oder ersetzen, um dem Pflegenotstand zu begegnen und die Kosten der Pflege zu senken. Damit gehen aber zahlreiche Herausforderungen einher, die nicht zuletzt ethische Fragen berühren: Eine durch Technik bzw. Roboter gestützte Pflege wird diese in ihrem Kern verändern, Professions- und Menschenbilder werden infrage gestellt und moralische Ansprüche tangiert. Der Beitrag zeichnet diese Gemengelage nach und skizziert ein diskursethisch ausgerichtetes Verfahren (MEESTAR) zur Aushandlung der Bedingungen für den Robotereinsatz in der Pflege- und Gesundheitsversorgung.
Cybersecurity in Health Care
(2020)
Ethical questions have always been crucial in health care; the rapid dissemination of ICT makes some of those questions even more pressing and also raises new ones. One of these new questions is cybersecurity in relation to ethics in health care. In order to more closely examine this issue, this chapter introduces Beauchamp and Childress’ four principles of biomedical ethics as well as additional ethical values and technical aims of relevance for health care. Based on this, two case studies—implantable medical devices and electronic Health Card—are presented, which illustrate potential conflicts between ethical values and technical aims as well as between ethical values themselves. It becomes apparent that these conflicts cannot be eliminated in general but must be reconsidered on a case-by-case basis. An ethical debate on cybersecurity regarding the design and implementation of new (digital) technologies in health care is essential.