Monday, October 8, 2018

We were discussing garbage collection and compaction.With objects, we don't have to create the graph. Instead we have to find ways to classify them by generation. Any classification of the objects is considered temporary until the next usage. At that point, the same objects may need reclassification. Since the classification is temporal, we run the risk of mislabeling generations and consequently reclaiming an object when it wasn't supposed to be.
We can also consider a markdown approach where after labeling the objects, we progressively mark them down so that we take actions only on the labels that are older than the oldest classification. This will help with keeping the classification and the reaping separate. The above approach will enable no actions to be taken if just the classification is needed. And also helping with taking different actions on the different tiers. For example, evict and delete may be considered separate actions. 
The unit of moving operation is an object here only because applications use objects. However, the cache may choose to stash swaths of objects at a time for shifting or ignoring. For example, we could use heap to keep track of the biggest available swath to roll for objects of arbitrary size. 
We may also have a compact version for keeping a running track of all the swaths. For example, if they are consecutive, we could coalesce them. If there is a set of active objects that can be margined into a swath, it can be marked as busy and ignored. If there are too many alternating swaths of free and busy object swaths, they can be retained as such and ignored from coalescing.
Busy swaths may need to be updated as candidate for conversion to free whenever objects are moved out of it.
Busy swaths can also be coalesced if they permit. This is usually not necessary because it is too aggressive and only a tiny fraction of the overall collection.
Movements of free and busy swaths are always opposite to each other. The free swaths move towards the younger generation where they can be utilized for gen 0.
The movement operation itself can be optimized by efficient bookkeeping so that it translates only to updates in the book-keeping

Sunday, October 7, 2018

The idea of compaction is that, objects are allocated contiguously assuming infinite caching. When they are no longer in use or they can be decommissioned, they are evicted from the cache. The compaction can be done in several sweeps and they can be triggered not just by the allocation of a new object but also periodically for the health of the cache.
With the help of the generations, the objects that are least likely to be used and hence good candidates to be reclaimed are close together on one end and the new ones are on the other end. With this gradation, we can efficiently perform delete operations on one end and additions on the other end
The process of shifting objects is compacting. As we walk through the cache linearly, we look for contiguous blocks of 'garbage' objects that can now be considered free space. The garbage collector now shifts the non-garbage objects down in cache, removing all of the gaps in the cache. The cache performs this operation and we call it rolling. Rolling doesn't have dependencies. Objects were reachable by their name or address.
Traditionally garbage collectors have been implemented with a graph representation of the objects to be reclaimed and following the principles of garbage collection from distributed computing. In this approach, all the objects of a heap derive from a base object which leads to a common root. During a collection, the entire set of objects on the heap then translates to an object graph which is finite and directed with a fixed set of vertices representing the objects but not the edges. The edges are added and deleted by a mutator process that modifies the graph objects that are connected can be called food and those that are not can be called garbage so we know which objects are to be collected. The mutator only adds edges if it has been marked as food.

Application of deep learning in text summarization : https://1drv.ms/w/s!Ashlm-Nw-wnWt1CQZVSOUjzUqITP

Saturday, October 6, 2018

This post is in continuation of the design for an object cache layer as described here. A specific use case now explains the aging of objects in the cache. While the object storage saved the objects for durability, the cache made it available for workloads to save on the cost of going deep into object storage.  The cache also translated the user workloads into an append-only workload for the object storage. This simplifies versioning and replication which can now be done in object storage at little or no cost. A Garbage Collection System demonstrates this aging.  While the cache can implement any one of the caching policies for retention of object, it can also be delegated to the user workload where the workload specifies which objects have aged. Then the cache merely schedules the storage of these objects into the object storage. Such a policy is best demonstrated in a user workload that implements a garbage collection system. And once it works well in the user workload, the logic can then be moved into the cache layer.
In this post and the next few, we bring up the .Net garbage collection as an example of such an aging policy. The .Net garbage collection is a generational markdown compactor. The compactor uses the notion of a generation to identify objects by their usage. The most used objects belong to a younger generation and those that are less used, belong to the older generation. The generation gives us an indication of age. The age of the object on the other hand, is the time from last use. We will describe the sweep and the collection shortly but we proceed with the notion that there is a metric that lets us identify the age of the object which the cache then rolls to object storage.

#codingexercise
Check if a number has less set than unset bits. 
boolean hasLessSetThanUnsetBits(int n) 
{ 
    int set = 0; 
    int unset = 0; 
    while (n) 
    { 
        if (n & 0x1) { 
             set++; 
        } else {  
             unset++; 
        } 
        n = n >> 1; 
    } 
    return (set < unset); 
} 

Friday, October 5, 2018

We were discussing the queue layer over Object Storage.

The reserving of certain queues in the queue layer and the reserving of certain object storage namespaces alleviates the need to have special purpose stacks. In addition, it reuses the existing to infrastructure for concerns such as monitoring, reporting, and background processes. There are no additional artifacts here other than the reservation so that they don’t mix with user data.

User queues and object storage could  be made as programmatically available collectively as they are made available individually. Many message queuing stacks provide APIs to manage the queues and they follow similar patterns. Unlike other SDKs, the queue layer does not merely provide the APIs associated with the queue. It consolidates functionality through the queue layer on the object storage that would have otherwise been directly accessible. Such automation of common tasks associated with the object storage for the purpose of queue management is a useful addition to the SDK.

While Queues serve a variety of purpose, they can come in especially useful to capture traffic. From network packets, api messages to just about anything that has a continuous flow, a queue will help record the traffic regardless of the flow. There are no upper limits to the number of messages in a queue and there is no limit to what can be stored in the object storage, therefore these will serve almost any traffic.

Queues do not need to actively participate in standard query operations on the captured traffic. They merely transfer the data to the object storage which can then serve the queries with the help a query execution engine like log parser that uses the available data as an enumerable. The query operations could include selection, aggregation, grouping and ordering.

Thursday, October 4, 2018

We were discussing the queue layer over Object Storage.

The reserving of certain queues in the queue layer and the reserving of certain object storage namespaces alleviates the need to have special purpose stacks. In addition, it reuses the existing to infrastructure for concerns such as monitoring, reporting, and background processes. There are no additional artifacts here other than the reservation so that they don’t mix with user data.

Securing system artifacts is equally necessary just as it is important to not allow data corruption. This can be achieved by isolation and encryption. Audit logs for example should not be tampered with. Therefore, they may be encrypted so that the data may not be modified even if they are leaked. System artifacts can use specific prefixes so that they are differentiated from user namespaces. In addition, these namespaces may not be allowed to be created by the user. Finally, data in transit must be secured just as much as it is necessary for the data at rest to be secured.

On the other hand, user queues and object storage must be made as programmatically available collectively as they are made easy individually. Many message queuing stacks provide APIs to manage the queues and they follow similar patterns. These APIs are made available over the web so they can be invoked remotely via direct calls. In addition, if SDKs are made available, then they can improve programmability. SDKs make working with queues and objects easier in the programming language of the user. They don’t need any extra setup and facilitate the calls made to the APIs.

Unlike other SDKs, the queue layer does not merely provide the APIs associated with the queue. It consolidates functionality through the queue layer on the object storage that would have otherwise been directly accessible. Such automation of common tasks associated with the object storage for the purpose of queue management is a useful addition to the SDK.

Wednesday, October 3, 2018

We resume our discussion on the queue layer over object storage from the previous post. It is important for the Queue layer to understand resources usages. These resources usage metrics may apply to different queues, per queue or even as granular as per services. For example, we may have a queue that services a single consumer. It may have process that return different status codes. A simple metric may be to find out success rate in terms of the overall processing made. The success in this case is determined by the number of success status code generated over the processing. Since this kind of metric comes from individual messages, the queue may want to aggregate these metrics across all messages. This is best shown in a dashboard with drill downs to different services. 
  
It's important to note that metrics data is inherently time based. Although metrics can be spot measurements, cumulative over time or delta between time slices, they have an association with the time that they were measured.  Consequently, most metric data is stored in a time series database. Also, previous measurements can be summarized with statistics while the running measurements apply to only the current window of time. Therefore, some of these time-series databases can even be fix-sized. 
  
There are many different tools available to present such charts from data sources. Almost all such reporting mechanisms want to pull data for their charts. However, they cannot directly call the services to query their metrics because this may affect the functionality and performance of those services. Therefore, they do it in a passive manner by finding information from log trails and database states. Most services have logging configured and their logs are usually indexed in a time series database of their own. In our case we can utilize the objects to as time-series buckets that fill over. Consequently, the pull information can come from dedicated namespaces, buckets and objects in the object storage. 


boolean hasLessSetThanUnsetBits(int n)
{
    int set = 0;
    int unset = 0;
    while (n)
    {
        if (n & 0x1) {
             set++;
        } else { 
             unset++;
        }
        n = n >> 1;
    }
    return (set < unset);
}

Tuesday, October 2, 2018

We were discussing topic detection in text document yesterday.
The following is another method to do it :
Def simultaneous_regressor_and_classifier(text, corpus):
                     Bounding_box = initialize_bounding_box
                     Clusters = []
                     Regressors = []
                     # finite iterations or till satisfaction
                     For i in range(10):
                                selected_text = select_text(bounding_box, text)
                                Cluster = classify(selected_text)
                                Clusters += [(bounding_box, cluster)]
                                Regressor = generate_match(cluster, corpus)
                                 Regressors += [(bounding_box, regressor)]
                                 Bounding_box = next_bounding_box(regressors, text)
                     Selections = select_top_clusters(clusters)
                     Return summary_from(selections)


The motivation behind this method is that the whole document need not be a single bounding box. The steps taken to determine topics in the whole document by the clustering of word vectors is also the same technique we apply to smaller sections. This guides towards locating topics within the text. What we did not specify was the selection of the bounding boxes. This holds no particular deviation from the general practice in object detection. The proposals each have a value for the intersection over union over the ground truth which can be used in a linear regression.  This penalizes false positives and noisy proposals in favor of those that lie along the regression line. As an alternative to choosing enough random proposals for the plot, we can also be selective in the choice of the bounding boxes by choosing those that have higher concentration of keywords.