| 1. |
- Donkervliet, Jesse, et al.
(författare)
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Servo : Increasing the Scalability of Modifiable Virtual Environments Using Serverless Computing
- 2023
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Ingår i: 2023 IEEE 43RD INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING SYSTEMS, ICDCS. - : Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). ; , s. 829-840
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Online games with modifiable virtual environments (MVEs) have become highly popular over the past decade. Among them, Minecraft-supporting hundreds of millions of users-is the best-selling game of all time, and is increasingly offered as a service. Although Minecraft is architected as a distributed system, in production it achieves this scale by partitioning small groups of players over isolated game instances. From the approaches that can help other kinds of virtual worlds scale, none is designed to scale MVEs, which pose a unique challenge-a mix between the count and complexity of active in-game constructs, player-created in-game programs, and strict quality of service. Serverless computing emerged recently and focuses, among others, on service scalability. Thus, addressing this challenge, in this work we explore using serverless computing to improve MVE scalability. To this end, we design, prototype, and evaluate experimentally Servo, a serverless backend architecture for MVEs. We implement Servo as a prototype and evaluate it using real-world experiments on two commercial serverless platforms, of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. Results offer strong support that our serverless MVE can significantly increase the number of supported players per instance without performance degradation, in our key experiment by 40 to 140 players per instance, which is a significant improvement over state-of-the-art commercial and open-source alternatives. We release Servo as open-source, on Github: https://github.com/atlarge-research/opencraft.
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| 2. |
- Dueso, Cristina, 1977, et al.
(författare)
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Reactivity of a NiO/Al2O3 oxygen carrier prepared by impregnation for chemical-looping combustion
- 2010
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Ingår i: Fuel. - : Elsevier BV. - 0016-2361. ; 89:11, s. 3399-3409
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The reactivity of a Ni-based oxygen carrier prepared by hot incipient wetness impregnation (HIWI) on alpha-Al2O3 with a NiO content of 18 wt% was studied in this work. Pulse experiments with the reduction period divided into 4-s pulses were performed in a fluidized bed reactor at 1223 K using CH4 as fuel. The number of pulses was between 2 and 12. Information about the gaseous product distribution and secondary reactions during the reduction was obtained. In addition to the direct reaction of the combustible gas with the oxygen carrier, CH4 steam reforming also had a significant role in the process, forming H-2 and CO. This reaction was catalyzed by metallic Ni in the oxygen carrier and H-2 and CO acted as intermediate products of the combustion. No evidence of carbon deposition was found in any case. Redox cycles were also carried out in a thermogravimetric analyzer (TGA) with H-2 as fuel. Both tests showed that there was a relation between the solid conversion reached during the reduction and the relative amount of NiO and NiAl2O4 in the oxygen carrier. When solid conversion increased, the NiO content also increased, and consequently NiAl2O4 decreased. Approximately 20% of the reduced nickel was oxidized to NiAl2O4, regardless DXs. NiAl2O4 was also an active compound for the combustion reaction, but with lower reactivity than NiO. Further, the consequences of these results with respect to the design of a CLC system were investigated. When formation of NiAl2O4 occurred, the average reactivity in the fuel reactor decreased. Therefore, the presence of both NiO and NiAl2O4 phases must be considered for the design of a CLC facility. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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| 3. |
- Eismann, Simon, et al.
(författare)
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The State of Serverless Applications: Collection, Characterization, and Community Consensus
- 2022
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Ingår i: IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. - 0098-5589 .- 1939-3520. ; 48:10, s. 4152-4166
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Over the last five years, all major cloud platform providers have increased their serverless offerings. Many early adopters report significant benefits for serverless-based over traditional applications, and many companies are considering moving to serverless themselves. However, currently there exist only few, scattered, and sometimes even conflicting reports on when serverless applications are well suited and what the best practices for their implementation are. We address this problem in the present study about the state of serverless applications. We collect descriptions of 89 serverless applications from open-source projects, academic literature, industrial literature, and domain-specific feedback. We analyze 16 characteristics that describe why and when successful adopters are using serverless applications, and how they are building them. We further compare the results of our characterization study to 10 existing, mostly industrial, studies and datasets; this allows us to identify points of consensus across multiple studies, investigate points of disagreement, and overall confirm the validity of our results. The results of this study can help managers to decide if they should adopt serverless technology, engineers to learn about current practices of building serverless applications, and researchers and platform providers to better understand the current landscape of serverless applications.
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| 4. |
- van Eyk, Erwin, et al.
(författare)
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Beyond Microbenchmarks: The SPEC-RG Vision for a Comprehensive Serverless Benchmark
- 2020
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Ingår i: Companion of the ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering. - New York, NY, USA : ACM. - 9781450371094 ; , s. 26-31
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Serverless computing services, such as Function-as-a-Service (FaaS), hold the attractive promise of a high level of abstraction and high performance, combined with the minimization of operational logic. Several large ecosystems of serverless platforms, both open- and closed-source, aim to realize this promise. Consequently, a lucrative market has emerged. However, the performance trade-offs of these systems are not well-understood. Moreover, it is exactly the high level of abstraction and the opaqueness of the operational-side that make performance evaluation studies of serverless platforms challenging. Learning from the history of IT platforms, we argue that a benchmark for serverless platforms could help address this challenge. We envision a comprehensive serverless benchmark, which we contrast to the narrow focus of prior work in this area. We argue that a comprehensive benchmark will need to take into account more than just runtime overhead, and include notions of cost, realistic workloads, more (open-source) platforms, and cloud integrations. Finally, we show through preliminary real-world experiments how such a benchmark can help compare the performance overhead when running a serverless workload on state-of-the-art platforms.
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