Deep neural network (DNN) models are crucial for Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. In a multi-access edge computing (MEC) system, IoT devices dispatch their requests to a nearby edge server to accelerate DNN inference. Recently, processing-in-memory (PIM) accelerators have emerged for DNN inference due to their power and area efficiency. However, current scheduling methods primarily focus on single-DNN workloads and do not fully utilize PIM’s potential for managing multi-DNN workloads in MEC scenarios. Additionally, PIM accelerators face challenges such as inflexible resource allocation and costly write operations, constraining the direct application of GPU scheduling techniques. In this paper, we define the multi-DNN scheduling problem on the PIM accelerator. To reduce the problem’s complexity, we propose a heuristic optimization algorithm, called Leader-Follower. Using this algorithm, we present PimShare, a scheduler for the PIM accelerator to process multi-DNN workloads. PimShare schedules multi-DNN inference requests to enable both temporal and spatial multiplexing, which can enhance hardware utilization. Compared with baseline scheduling methods, including those adapted from GPU scheduling, PimShare can achieve up to a two-order-of-magnitude improvement in throughput and scale the high throughput to workloads containing 18 DNN models. In addition, PimShare reduces write operations and processing latency.

Matrix-vector multiplication (MVM) operations, essential for modern hardware architectures, suffer from heavy I/O overheads and costly serial multiply-add operations. The emerging Compute-in-Memory (CIM) architecture alleviates these issues by enabling in situ MVM operations with O(1) time complexity, eliminating the need to move matrices. However, current storage schemes are still inefficient on CIM due to limited optimization objectives and inflexible support for various access patterns and matrix structures. To address this, we propose HyperMR, a hypergraph-enhanced matrix storage scheme for CIM architectures. First, we identify two performance optimization objectives that are tailored to CIM and prove their NP-hardness. We then introduce a hypergraph modeling approach with a novel access-aware hypergraph generation algorithm to handle diverse matrix structures and access patterns. Moreover, we present a two-phase hypergraph partitioning method to efficiently tackle the NP-hard optimization objectives. Experimental results show that HyperMR outperforms multiple state-of-the-art storage schemes, offering valid optimization for all evaluated matrices, compared to the best-performing baseline which optimizes only 75%. HyperMR also achieves the best average optimization performance for matrix storage layouts, significantly improving efficiency in varied workload scenarios, with a 29.65% improvement on synthetic queries and up to 34.9% on scientific image filtering.

MOTIVATION: Neoantigens, derived from somatic mutations in cancer cells, can elicit anti-tumor immune responses when presented to autologous T cells by human leukocyte antigen. Identifying immunogenic neoantigens is crucial for cancer immunotherapy development. However, the accuracy of current bioinformatic methods remains unsatisfactory. Surface and structural features of peptide-HLA class I (pHLA-I) complexes offer valuable insight into the immunogenicity of neoantigens. RESULTS: We present NeoaPred, a deep-learning framework for neoantigen prediction. NeoaPred accurately constructs pHLA-I complex structures, with 82.37% of the predicted structures showing an RMSD of < 1 Å. Using these structures, NeoaPred integrates differences in surface, structural, and atom group features between the mutant peptide and its wild-type counterpart to predict a foreignness score. This foreignness score is an effective factor for neoantigen prediction, achieving an AUROC (Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve) of 0.81 and an AUPRC (Area Under the Precision-Recall Curve) of 0.54 in the test set, outperforming existing methods. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The source code is released under an Apache v2.0 license and is available at the GitHub repository (https://github.com/Dulab2020/NeoaPred).

Data analysts nowadays are keen to have analytical capabilities involving deep learning (DL). Collaborative queries, which employ relational operations to process structured data and DL models to process unstructured data, provide a powerful facility for DL-based in-database analysis. The classical approach to support collaborative queries in relational databases is to integrate DL models with user-defined functions (UDFs) in a general-purpose language (e.g., C++) to process unstructured data. This approach suffers from suboptimal performance as the opaque UDFs preclude the generation of an optimal query plan. A recent work, DL2SQL, addresses the problem of collaborative query optimization by first converting DL computations into SQL subqueries and then using a classical relational query optimizer to optimize the entire collaborative query. However, the DL2SQL approach compromises usability by requiring data analysts to manually manage DL-related data and tune query performance. To this end, this paper introduces AQUA, an analytical database designed for efficient collaborative query processing. Built on DL2SQL, AQUA automates translations from collaborative queries into SQL queries. To enhance usability, AQUA introduces two techniques: 1) a declarative scheme for DL-related data management, and 2) DL-specific optimizations for collaborative query processing, eliminating the burden of manual data management and performance tuning from the data analysts. We demonstrate the key contributions of AQUA via a web APP that allows the audience to perform collaborative queries on the CIFAR-10 dataset.

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in adopting published neural retrieval models learned from corpora for text retrieval. Although these models achieve excellent retrieval performance, in terms of popular accuracy metrics, on datasets they have been trained, their performance on new text data might degrade. To obtain the desired retrieval performance on both the data used in training and the latest data collected after training, the simple approach of learning a new model from both datasets is not always feasible since the annotated dataset used in training is often not published along with the learned model. Knowledge amalgamation (KA) is an emerging technique to deal with this problem of inaccessibility of data used in previous training. KA learns a new model (called a student model) from new data by reusing (called amalgamating) a number of trained models (called teacher models) instead of accessing the teachers' original training data. However, in order to efficiently learn an accurate student model, the classical KA approach requires manual selection of an appropriate subset of teacher models for amalgamation. This manual procedure for selecting teacher models prevents the classical KA from being scaled to retrieval tasks for which a large number of candidate teacher models are ready to be reused.

Modern mobile applications often produce decentralized data, i.e., a huge amount of privacy-sensitive data distributed over a large number of mobile devices. Techniques for learning models from decentralized data must properly handle two natures of such data, namely privacy and massive engagement. Federated learning (FL) is a promising approach for such a learning task since the technique learns models from data without exposing privacy. However, traditional FL methods assume that the participating mobile devices are honest volunteers. This assumption makes traditional FL methods unsuitable for applications where two kinds of participants are engaged: 1) self-interested participants who, without economical stimulus, are reluctant to contribute their computing resources unconditionally, and 2) malicious participants who send corrupt updates to disrupt the learning process. This paper proposes Refiner, a reliable federated learning system for tackling the challenges introduced by massive engagements of self-interested and malicious participants. Refiner is built upon Ethereum, a public blockchain platform. To engage self-interested participants, we introduce an incentive mechanism which rewards each participant in terms of the amount of its training data and the performance of its local updates. To handle malicious participants, we propose an audit scheme which employs a committee of randomly chosen validators for punishing them with no reward and preclude corrupt updates from the global model. The proposed incentive and audit scheme is implemented with cryptocurrency and smart contract, two primitives offered by Ethereum. This paper demonstrates the main features of Refiner by training a digit classification model on the MNIST dataset.

In this demonstration, we present a new definition of integrity constraint that is more powerful for anomalous data discovery. In our definition, a constraint is functioned on both categorical and numerical attributes in relational tables, as well as their derivative attributes, leading to a huge search space. Furthermore, we are the first to take into account attribute value distribution as part of a constraint. Based on the proposed integrity constraint, we build AUDITOR on top of relational tables from the industry of healthcare auditing and demonstrate its effectiveness and ease-of-use for domain experts to discover anomalous data.

Modern Internet applications often produce a large volume of user activity records. Data analysts are interested in cohort analysis, or finding unusual user behavioral trends, in these large tables of activity records. In a traditional database system, cohort analysis queries are both painful to specify and expensive to evaluate. We propose to extend database systems to support cohort analysis. We do so by extending SQL with three new operators. We devise three different evaluation schemes for cohort query processing. Two of them adopt a non-intrusive approach. The third approach employs a columnar based evaluation scheme with optimizations specifically designed for cohort query processing. Our experimental results confirm the performance benefits of our proposed columnar database system, compared against the two non-intrusive approaches that implement cohort queries on top of regular relational databases.

The Big Data problem is characterized by the so called 3V features: Volume - a huge amount of data, Velocity - a high data ingestion rate, and Variety - a mix of structured data, semi-structured data, and unstructured data. The state-of-the-art solutions to the Big Data problem are largely based on the MapReduce framework (aka its open source implementation Hadoop). Although Hadoop handles the data volume challenge successfully, it does not deal with the data variety well since the programming interfaces and its associated data processing model is inconvenient and inefficient for handling structured data and graph data. This paper presents epiC , an extensible system to tackle the Big Data's data variety challenge. epiC introduces a general Actor-like concurrent programming model, independent of the data processing models, for specifying parallel computations. Users process multi-structured datasets with appropriate epiC extensions, the implementation of a data processing model best suited for the data type and auxiliary code for mapping that data processing model into epiC 's concurrent programming model. Like Hadoop, programs written in this way can be automatically parallelized and the runtime system takes care of fault tolerance and inter-machine communications. We present the design and implementation of epiC 's concurrent programming model. We also present two customized data processing model, an optimized MapReduce extension and a relational model, on top of epiC. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed epiC.

The corporate network is often used for sharing information among the participating companies and facilitating collaboration in a certain industry sector where companies share a common interest. It can effectively help the companies to reduce their operational costs and increase the revenues. However, the inter-company data sharing and processing poses unique challenges to such a data management system including scalability, performance, throughput, and security. In this paper, we present BestPeer++, a system which delivers elastic data sharing services for corporate network applications in the cloud based on BestPeer - a peer-to-peer (P2P) based data management platform. By integrating cloud computing, database, and P2P technologies into one system, BestPeer++ provides an economical, flexible and scalable platform for corporate network applications and delivers data sharing services to participants based on the widely accepted pay-as-you-go business model. We evaluate BestPeer++ on Amazon EC2 Cloud platform. The benchmarking results show that BestPeer++ outperforms HadoopDB, a recently proposed large-scale data processing system, in performance when both systems are employed to handle typical corporate network workloads. The benchmarking results also demonstrate that BestPeer++ achieves near linear scalability for throughput with respect to the number of peer nodes.

Companies are increasingly moving their data processing to the cloud, for reasons of cost, scalability, and convenience, among others. However, hosting multiple applications and storage systems on the same cloud introduces resource sharing and heterogeneous data processing challenges due to the variety of resource usage patterns employed, the variety of data types stored, and the variety of query interfaces presented by those systems. Furthermore, real clouds are never perfectly symmetric - there often are differences between individual processors in their capabilities and connectivity. In this paper, we introduce a federation framework to manage such heterogeneous clouds. We then use this framework to discuss several challenges and their potential solutions.

The corporate network is often used for sharing information among the participating companies and facilitating collaboration in a certain industry sector where companies share a common interest. It can effectively help the companies to reduce their operational costs and increase the revenues. However, the inter-company data sharing and processing poses unique challenges to such a data management system including scalability, performance, throughput, and security. In this paper, we present Best Peer++, a system which delivers elastic data sharing services for corporate network applications in the cloud based on Best Peer -- a peer-to-peer (P2P) based data management platform. By integrating cloud computing, database, and P2P technologies into one system, Best Peer++ provides an economical, flexible and scalable platform for corporate network applications and delivers data sharing services to participants based on the widely accepted pay-as-you-go business model. We evaluate Best Peer++ on Amazon EC2 Cloud platform. The benchmarking results show that Best Peer++ outperforms Hadoop DB, a recently proposed large-scale data processing system, in performance when both systems are employed to handle typical corporate network workloads. The benchmarking results also demonstrate that Best Peer++ achieves near linear scalability for throughput with respect to the number of peer nodes.

Cloud computing represents a paradigm shift driven by the increasing demand of Web based applications for elastic, scalable and efficient system architectures that can efficiently support their ever-growing data volume and large-scale data analysis. A typical data management system has to deal with real-time updates by individual users, and as well as periodical large scale analytical processing, indexing, and data extraction. While such operations may take place in the same domain, the design and development of the systems have somehow evolved independently for transactional and periodical analytical processing. Such a system-level separation has resulted in problems such as data freshness as well as serious data storage redundancy. Ideally, it would be more efficient to apply ad-hoc analytical processing on the same data directly. However, to the best of our knowledge, such an approach has not been adopted in real implementation. Intrigued by such an observation, we have designed and implemented epiC, an elastic power-aware data-itensive Cloud platform for supporting both data intensive analytical operations (ref. as OLAP) and online transactions (ref. as OLTP). In this paper, we present ES2- the elastic data storage system of epiC, which is designed to support both functionalities within the same storage. We present the system architecture and the functions of each system component, and experimental results which demonstrate the efficiency of the system.

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) bridge the virtual cyber world with the real physical world. For representing a physical environment in cyber, CPS devices / nodes are assigned to collect data in a region of interest. In practice, the nodes seldom fully cover the region due to the restriction of quantity and cost. Hence, the sampled data are usually inadequate to describe the holistic environment. Recent researches mainly focus on the interpolation methods to generate an approximating model from the raw data. However, in this paper, we propose to study the spatio-temporal distribution of CPS nodes in order to obtain the crucial data for optimal environment abstraction. There are two target problems. First, when the environment changes little over time, what is the optimal spatial distribution of stationary nodes based on historical data? Second, when the environment is time-varying, what is the adaptive spatio-temporal distribution of mobile nodes? We show the NP hardness of the former problem and propose an approximation algorithm. For the latter problem, we develop a cooperative movement algorithm on nodes for achieving a curvature-weighted distribution pattern. A trace driven simulation based on real data of GreenOrbs project evaluates the performance of the proposed approaches.

MapReduce has been widely used for large-scale data analysis in the Cloud. The system is well recognized for its elastic scalability and fine-grained fault tolerance although its performance has been noted to be suboptimal in the database context. According to a recent study [19], Hadoop, an open source implementation of MapReduce, is slower than two state-of-the-art parallel database systems in performing a variety of analytical tasks by a factor of 3.1 to 6.5. MapReduce can achieve better performance with the allocation of more compute nodes from the cloud to speed up computation; however, this approach of "renting more nodes" is not cost effective in a pay-as-you-go environment. Users desire an economical elastically scalable data processing system, and therefore, are interested in whether MapReduce can offer both elastic scalability and efficiency. In this paper, we conduct a performance study of MapReduce (Hadoop) on a 100-node cluster of Amazon EC2 with various levels of parallelism. We identify five design factors that affect the performance of Hadoop, and investigate alternative but known methods for each factor. We show that by carefully tuning these factors, the overall performance of Hadoop can be improved by a factor of 2.5 to 3.5 for the same benchmark used in [19], and is thus more comparable to that of parallel database systems. Our results show that it is therefore possible to build a cloud data processing system that is both elastically scalable and efficient.

A Cloud may be seen as a type of flexible computing infrastructure consisting of many compute nodes, where resizable computing capacities can be provided to different customers. To fully harness the power of the Cloud, efficient data management is needed to handle huge volumes of data and support a large number of concurrent end users. To achieve that, a scalable and high-throughput indexing scheme is generally required. Such an indexing scheme must not only incur a low maintenance cost but also support parallel search to improve scalability. In this paper, we present a novel, scalable B + -tree based indexing scheme for efficient data processing in the Cloud. Our approach can be summarized as follows. First, we build a local B + -tree index for each compute node which only indexes data residing on the node. Second, we organize the compute nodes as a structured overlay and publish a portion of the local B + -tree nodes to the overlay for efficient query processing. Finally, we propose an adaptive algorithm to select the published B + -tree nodes according to query patterns. We conduct extensive experiments on Amazon's EC2, and the results demonstrate that our indexing scheme is dynamic, efficient and scalable.

Multi-tenant data management is a form of software as a service (SaaS), whereby a third party service provider hosts databases as a service and provides its customers with seamless mechanisms to create, store and access their databases at the host site. One of the main problems in such a system, as we shall discuss in this paper, is scalability, namely the ability to serve an increasing number of tenants without too much query performance degradation. A promising way to handle the scalability issue is to consolidate tuples from different tenants into the same shared tables. However, this approach introduces two problems: 1) The shared tables are too sparse. 2)Indexing on shared tables is not effective. To resolve the problems, we propose a multi-tenant database system called M-Store, which provides storage and indexing services for multi-tenants. To improve the scalability of the system, we develop two techniques in M-Store: bitmap interpreted tuple (BIT) and multi-separated index (MSI). BIT is efficient in that it does not store NULLs from unused attributes in the shared tables and MSI provides flexibility since it only indexes each tenant's own data on frequently accessed attributes. We extended MySQL based on our proposed design and conducted extensive experiments. The experimental results show that our proposed approach is a promising multi-tenancy storage and indexing scheme which can be easily integrated into existing DBMS.