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Mining for statistical models of availability in large-scale distributed systems: An empirical study of SETI@home

  • Bahman Javadi
  • , Derrick Kondo
  • , Jean Marc Vincent
  • , David P. Anderson

Research output: Chapter in Book / Conference PaperConference Paperpeer-review

51 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

In the age of cloud, Grid, P2P, and volunteer distributed computing, large-scale systems with tens of thousands of unreliable hosts are increasingly common. Invariably, these systems are composed of heterogeneous hosts whose individual availability often exhibit different statistical properties (for example stationary versus non-stationary behavior) and fit different models (for example Exponential, Weibull, or Pareto probability distributions). In this paper, we describe an effective method for discovering subsets of hosts whose availability have similar statistical properties and can be modelled with similar probability distributions. We apply this method with about 230,000 host availability traces obtained from a real large-scale Internet-distributed system, namely SETI@home. We find that about 34% of hosts exhibit availability that is a truly random process, and that these hosts can often be modelled accurately with a few distinct distributions from different families. We believe that this characterization is fundamental in the design of stochastic scheduling algorithms across large-scale systems where host availability is uncertain.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2009 IEEE International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems, MASCOTS 2009
Pages89-98
Number of pages10
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2009
Externally publishedYes
Event2009 IEEE International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems, MASCOTS 2009 - London, United Kingdom
Duration: 21 Sept 200923 Sept 2009

Publication series

NameProceedings - IEEE Computer Society's Annual International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunications Systems, MASCOTS
ISSN (Print)1526-7539

Conference

Conference2009 IEEE International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems, MASCOTS 2009
Country/TerritoryUnited Kingdom
CityLondon
Period21/09/0923/09/09

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