Parsing Large Data Files Makes Creating Tables Easier!

Hello Everyone!

Sorry for the updating delay on my end.  As Rachelle mentioned in earlier blog posts, I also attended the ISPASS Conference towards the end of March.  I listened to a couple presentations on GPU’s, CloudSuite, a talk that included information on Google’s MapReduce, and more.  It was a very interesting experience to listen to Ph.D. level discussions in Computer Science.  During the talk on CloudSuite, a suite of applications for evaluating server designs, it was interesting to hear the professionals in the room questioning the speaker about the applications in the suite.  I believe I agree with the professionals in their disappointment that this suite does not take I/O into real consideration in its evaluation of the server, especially if this is to be marketed as a tool to use in a data center.  Otherwise, I would consider using this suite to gather more data center application data for our research.  It was also an awesome experience to meet some of the people that Rachelle and I met at ISPASS, including Duke!

In between CCSC South West Region Conference and ISPASS, I did perform classification calculations on the data we collected from SpecJBB, and last week I finished a program for parsing our data files into more manageable files.  Yay!  That has saved us a ton of time and headaches!  So far we’ve seen that one run of SpecJBB is not being classified with the rest on a fairly regular basis.  Granted, we’re not finished creating our data tables based on the results.  However, a classification rate of 5 out 6 runs of SpecJBB being classified correctly is pretty cool.  We’ll have to delve deeper into that run of SpecJBB and see what’s going on with it.

Also, we’ve gotten new power meters to use for collecting data!!!

Later!

Data!

Hey everyone,

So Jolie and I have data collected (again) with SpecJBB as part of our trace set. We ran all of our traces through our classification algorithm and now our task is getting our data into LaTex tables and then analyzing them. It’s not terribly exciting, but hopefully we’ll get finished sooner than we did last semester, since Jolie made a parsing script that gets the relevant data we want to look at. It’s also easier because we can just copy-paste the data into the tables I made last semester. So yay! The faster we get this analyzing and data collecting done there’s more of a chance for us to actually write a technical paper of our research for the past year. 

Also, Dr. Rivoire and I are in the process of finishing up our Grace Hopper application. We turned in the actual poster submission, but now we’re doing the scholarship application so I can get funding to actually go to the conference. This pretty much involves a letter of recommendation (Rivoire’s court), a 500-word essay on why I want to go and what I’ll do with the experience (yay feminism!), and my resume. Pretty much the hardest part — my resume’s pretty dinky considering I’ve only had two real significant jobs in my lifetime, but at least those jobs were awesomesauce. Making a resume is so difficult though. No me gusta.

Anyway, just thought I’d update you all on the happenings around here, but that’s pretty much it (unless Jolie wants to talk about her conference experience, maybe?). Toodles!

ISPASS and Classifications

Hey everyone,

So sorry for not updating the blog regularly — it’s been a pretty crazy semester what with all the school projects that Jolie and I have had to do, but hopefully I can get back on track now that  I have three major projects left for each of my classes. I think Jolie has one; not sure. But never fear! Jolie and I haven’t been idle in our work; in fact, we have six fresh runs of SpecJBB (three on each of our machines) and data on those runs that we just have to analyze. So hopefully next week we’ll be able to post our results and findings.

Anyway, last week Jolie and I went to the International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software (ISPASS) where we attended talks about applications and benchmarks, analytic and statistical models, online profiling, cache and memory systems, and GPUs. I attended the talks about GPUs, but as interesting as they were, a lot of the information went completely over my head. I can’t remember what Jolie went to, so I’ll let her create her own post about her experience.

The most interesting part of the trip were the people. We met people from different universities across the world, people who worked at Microsoft Research and Google, and people who worked for various corporations involved in research. We had dinner with the group that put ISPASS together and a few of them work at Duke University; they talked to Dr. Rivoire about possible funding for getting a master’s degree there. I didn’t think I’d ever want to go get my master’s so soon after getting my bachelor’s, but heck, why not? Sounds exciting.

Anyway, I’m having intense writer’s block, so I think I’ll stop here and let Jolie take over. Toodles!

 

-Rachelle

CCSC South West Region Conference and Grace Hopper Conference

Hello Everyone,

This past weekend I attended the CCSC South West Region Conference at CSU Northridge.  It was a great experience!  The attendees made me feel very welcomed there!  It was a small conference, and a majority of the papers and presentations were based on research in education aspects of Computer Science.  The student poster session had 5 posters, including mine.  I had lots of great questions and receptions to my presentation.  I’m really glad that I had the opportunity to attend the conference!  🙂

Rachelle spent most of last week finishing her 2-page abstract paper and submitted it to the Grace Hopper Conference.  It was quite the experience trying to discuss our work in the span of two pages.

Later!

More Conference Preparations!

Hello Everyone!

Rachelle and I have been hard at work preparing for our conferences.  Rachelle is finishing a short abstract to submit for the Grace Hopper Conference, and my poster abstract has been accepted into the CCSC South Western Region Conference.  My travel arrangements have been booked, and my poster is just about to get printed.

As far as SPECJBB goes, we have collected our data from running the application on both LolCat and Rageface.  Next we will be running the data through the Random Forest classification algorithm to see how our newly expanded data collection classifies together.

Later!

Conference Preparations!

Hello everyone!

Jolie and I are still hacking away at our abstracts for our respective conferences that we’re going to (Jolie at Northridge, me at GHC). Jolie’s pretty much done with her two paragraph summary and I believe she’s started creating the basics of her poster. Rivoire and I are still going through my paragraph to tweak the wording and whatnot. I have an outline for my poster, but I still have to write the overall, 2 page abstract.

Since Jolie is graduating, she’ll be going to Northridge this semester. I’m not graduating until next fall, which is just as well, because the GHC conference isn’t until October, I think. It’s a little strange that GHC wants the abstracts submitted so early for a conference so late, but at least I’ll get everything done earlier rather than later.

Anyway, we’re in the process of completing our last run of SpecJBB (should be finished already, actually) on our first machine, Lolcat. We started installing Spec on Rageface at the same time so we could immediately switch meters and jump into collecting three runs again. Installing Spec is a bit of a hassle since we had to update the version of Java JDK and JRE we were using. Plus the installation itself takes a super long time, so we just left it alone while we worked on our abstracts.

Tomorrow we plan on running Spec on Rageface for real. We have to configure the scripts we use, but that should be somewhat easy since we already did so on Lolcat.

Well, that’s all for updates now. Toodles!

Of Abstracts, Posters, Conferences, and Spec JBB

Hello All!

This week Rachelle and I have been attempting to get Spec JBB to run its full length on one of our machines.  Thus far it has not liked running its full length when starting it via an ssh login to our data collecting machine, so we have resorted to traveling to where the monitor and keyboard attached to the machine is physically located and running the benchmark from there.  We did overcome the hurdle of the Java Virtual Machine running out of memory – use the command line flag -Xmx#g (Insert an actual number for the # mark, but it can’t be larger than the amount of RAM on the machine.  Preferably it should be lower, or you run the risk of the machine running out of much needed memory.).

Rachelle and I have also begun writing abstracts for submission to the conferences that each of us will be attending.  Rachelle has to somehow condense a summary of her work into 100 words…  We have also started work on our posters.  A couple fellow research assistants were kind enough to share their poster with us so we can have an idea of what information to include on it.

That’s about all we have for now until we have finished collecting Spec JBB data.

We’re Back!

Hello everyone!

I hope you all had a nice winter break (or, for those of you who aren’t in school, a nice vacation and Christmas/New Year’s). Jolie and I definitely did.

Now we’re back and we’ve got a lot of stuff planned. First, we’re going to start making runs of SpecJBB, our new benchmark, on our different machines. We had a trial run to see just how long Spec actually took without any restrictions on time and it ran for about three and a half hours. It definitely seems like a long time, but it’s still reasonable enough for us to actually start gathering data. We’ll fuddle with different parameters (we’re looking specifically at how much memory Spec gets) once we have our initial runs.

While Spec is running, we’re going to start our preparations for our different conferences. This semester Jolie, while she’s still a student, will be going to the Consortium for Computing Science in College and I will be going to the Grace Hopper Conference in the fall. So we will be preparing abstracts and posters to submit to these conferences. We’ll be going over work that we’ve done last semester as well as last summer — our work has a lot of components, so there’s no shortage of topics to choose from.

Anyway, sorry the update is so short — hopefully we’ll have more to tell you later!

–Rachelle

Making R and Mavericks Play Nicely

Around the end of October, Apple released its latest version of OS X, 10.9 – Mavericks.  After a couple weeks of seeing my fellow classmates not having any problems downloading and installing it, I decided to do the same.  Little did I realize that the installation of the new OS deleted all of the files for the gcc and g++ compilers.  That was a shock to me when I first tried to compile/run a C++ program after the update.  I then downloaded the new version of XCode to go with Mavericks, and re-downloaded/installed the command line tools.  C/C++ files could then compile and run on my computer once again.  Yay!!

Then came using R for our research work…

When I tried using R again for writing code for this research project, I ran into some really strange problems that I had not had before with the R interpreter that I use (http://www.r-project.org/).  Somehow just trying to load a library that I had not downloaded and installed yet resulted in R running into a segmentation fault and basically crashing instead of just giving me a friendly error message.  Not cool.  I figured there had to be something strange going on between R and Mavericks, so I did some research.  I learned that Mavericks was no longer using the usual gcc/g++ compiler, and instead changed to clang.  Thanks Apple.  What did this mean for getting R up and running again?  First, I had to dig into the makeconf file for R and change a couple settings in there to use clang and clang++ instead of gcc and g++.  Then I had to download and install the latest version of the R interpreter.

Thankfully overall this was a less painful process than I had been expecting, and R now works wonderfully!  Also, my research work in solving this issue was passed on to the department’s personal IT guy to use on all the Apple computers in the labs.  😀

Below are links to a couple of the websites that I read through when researching the fix to this problem:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19533220/cannot-install-r-package-from-source-in-mac-osx-maverick
(Do not make the suggested CXXFLAGS change!  -O3 adds a ton of other compiler optimization flags that alter the code at compilation for faster execution, but can also add unintended bugs.)
http://citizen-statistician.org/2013/10/27/warning-mac-os-10-9-mavericks-and-r-dont-play-nicely/
http://blog.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.r.mac

Happy Holidays!

Winter Break, Finals, and SpecJBB!!

Hello everyone!

We hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving Break (mmm food…) and we hope you will have a great Winter Break (CHRISTMAS AGH) too. However, we should get some specs out of the way first.

Jolie and I are going to use this week (probably not next week because finals) to completely finish the report and make it spiffy and fantastic. All we really have to do is read over our analyses, make sure they sound educated (I really need to do that), and make sure it is production ready. It’s not too much to do, but it will keep us busy.

Also, now that we have SpecJBB, Jolie and I are going to spend winter break running the benchmark on our machines with different input sets. We hope that we will have all of the traces recorded before break ends so that next semester we’ll be ready to start using those traces along with all of our other ones and basically redo everything we did this semester with the new data set. Yay (not yay).

We were only able to get SpecJBB set up thanks to our lovely colleague, Lowell. Thanks, Lowell!

Well, as short as this post is, I’m going to have to cut it. Toodles!