Backup systems often adopt deduplication techniques for data reduction. Real-world backup products often group files into larger units (called packed files) before deduplicating them. The grouping entails inserting metadata immediately before the contents of each file in the packed file. Some metadata change with every backup, producing substantial similar (non-duplicate) chunks. Delta compression can remove redundancy among those similar chunks but cannot be applied to HDD-based backup storage because I/Os required for fetching base chunks result in severe throughput loss. For packed datasets, some duplicate chunks, called persistent fragmented chunks (PFCs), are rewritten every backup. We observe that corresponding chunk pairs surrounding identical PFCs are non-identical due to different metadata but similar to each other. In this article, we propose PFC-delta to perform high-performance delta compression for the aforementioned similar chunks on top of deduplication. PFC-delta identifies and prefetches potential base chunks stored along with PFCs by piggybacking on the routine I/Os during deduplication, thus avoiding extra I/Os. We also propose a hash-less delta encoding approach to reduce extra computational overheads. Evaluation results with four real-world datasets show that PFC-delta improves both compression ratio and restore performance, while increasing the backup throughput on all but one datasets.

Big data applications increasingly rely on the analysis of large graphs. In order to analyze and process the large graphs with high cost efficiency, researchers have developed a number of out-of-core graph processing systems in recent years based on just one commodity computer. On the other hand, with the rapidly growing need of analyzing graphs in the real-world, graph processing systems have to efficiently handle massive concurrent graph processing (CGP) jobs. Unfortunately, due to the inherent design for single graph processing job, existing out-of-core graph processing systems usually incur redundant data accesses and storage and severe competition of I/O bandwidth when handling the CGP jobs, thus leading to very long waiting time experienced by users for the computing results. In this paper, we propose an I/O-efficient out-of-core graph processing system, GraphCP, to support the processing of CGP jobs. GraphCP proposes a benefit-aware sharing execution model that shares the I/O access and processing of graph data among the CGP jobs and adaptively schedules the loading of graph data, which efficiently overcomes above challenges faced by existing out-of-core graph processing systems. In addition, GraphCP organizes the graph data with a Source-Sorted Sub-Block graph representation for better processing capacity and I/O access locality. Extensive evaluation results show that GraphCP is 10.3x and 4.6x faster than two state-of-the-art out-of-core graph processing systems GridGraph and GraphZ respectively, and 2.1x faster than a CGP-oriented graph processing system Seraph.

The smart grid faces with increasingly sophisticated cyber-physical threats, against which machine learning (ML)-based intrusion detection systems have become a powerful and promising solution to smart grid security monitoring. However, many ML algorithms presume that training and testing data follow the same or similar data distributions, which may not hold in the dynamic time-varying systems like the smart grid. As operating points may change dramatically over time, the resulting data distribution shifts could lead to degraded detection performance and delayed incidence responses. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a semi-supervised framework based on domain-adversarial training to transfer the knowledge of known attack incidences to detect returning threats at different hours and load patterns. Using normal operation data of the ISO New England grids, the proposed framework leverages adversarial training to adapt learned models against new attacks launched at different times of the day. Effectiveness of the proposed detection framework is evaluated against the well-studied false data injection attacks synthesized on the IEEE 30-bus system, and the results demonstrated the superiority of the framework against persistent threats recurring in the highly dynamic smart grid.

In recent years, a number of out-of-core graph processing systems have been proposed to process graphs with billions of edges on just one commodity computer, due to their high cost efficiency. To obtain a better performance, these systems adopt a full I/O model that scans all edges during the computation to avoid the inefficiency of random I/Os. Although this model ensures good I/O access locality, it leads to a large number of useless edges to be loaded when running graph algorithms that only access a small portion of edges in each iteration. An intuitive method to solve this I/O inefficiency problem is the on-demand I/O model that only accesses the active edges. However, this method only works well for the graph algorithms with very few active edges, since the I/O cost will grow rapidly as the number of active edges increases due to the increasing amount of random I/Os. In this article, we present HUS-Graph, an efficient out-of-core graph processing system to address the above I/O issues and achieve a good balance between I/O traffic and I/O access locality. HUS-Graph adopts a hybrid update strategy including two update models, Row-oriented Push (ROP) and Column-oriented Pull (COP). It supports switching between ROP and COP adaptively, for the graph algorithms that have different computation and I/O features. For traversal-based algorithms, HUS-Graph also provides an immediate propagation-based vertex update scheme to accelerate the vertex state propagation and convergence speed. Furthermore, HUS-Graph adopts a locality-optimized dual-block representation to organize graph data and an I/O-based performance prediction method to enable the system to dynamically select the optimal update model between ROP and COP. To save the disk space and further reduce I/O traffic, HUS-Graph implements a space-efficient storage format by combining several graph compression methods. Extensive experimental results show that HUS-Graph outperforms two existing out-of-core systems GraphChi and GridGraph by 1.2x-52.8x.

Big data applications increasingly rely on the analysis of large graphs. In recent years, a number of out-of-core graph processing systems have been proposed to process graphs with billions of edges on just one commodity computer, by efficiently using the secondary storage (e.g., hard disk, SSD). On the other hand, the vertex-centric computing model is extensively used in graph processing thanks to its good applicability and expressiveness. Unfortunately, when implementing vertex-centric model for out-of-core graph processing, the large number of random memory accesses required to construct subgraphs lead to a serious performance bottleneck that substantially weakens cache access locality and thus leads to very long waiting time experienced by users for the computing results. In this paper, we propose an efficient out-of-core graph processing system, LOSC, to substantially reduce the overhead of subgraph construction without sacrificing the underlying vertex-centric computing model. LOSC proposes a locality-optimized subgraph construction scheme that significantly improves the in-memory data access locality of the subgraph construction phase. Furthermore, LOSC adopts a compact edge storage format and a lightweight replication of vertices to reduce I/O traffic and improve computation efficiency. Extensive evaluation results show that LOSC is respectively 6.9x and 3.5x faster than GraphChi and GridGraph, two state-of-the-art out-of-core systems.

In recent years, a number of out-of-core graph processing systems have been proposed to process graphs with billions of edges on just one commodity computer, due to their high cost efficiency. To obtain the better performance, these systems adopt a full I/O model that accesses all edges during the computation to avoid the ineffectiveness of random I/Os. Although this model ensures good I/O access locality, it loads a large number of useless edges when running graph algorithms that only require a small portion of edges in each iteration. A natural method to solve this problem is the on-demand I/O model that only accesses the active edges. However, this method only works well for the graph algorithms with very few active edges, since the I/O cost will grow rapidly as the number of active edges increases due to larger amount of random I/Os.