PARALLEL DATA LAB 

PDL Abstract

Scaling Up Clustered Network Appliances with ScaleBricks

Proc. ACM SIGCOMM 2015, August 17-21, 2015, London, United Kingdom.

Dong Zhou, Bin Fan, Hyeontaek Lim, David G. Andersen, Michael Kaminsky†, Michael Mitzenmacher*, Ren Wang†, Ajaypal Singh

Carnegie Mellon University,
†Intel Labs,
*Harvard University,
‡Connectem, Inc.

http://www.pdl.cmu.edu/

Systematic testing, first demonstrated in small, specialized cases 15 years ago, has matured sufficiently for large-scale systems developers to begin to put it into practice. With actual deployment come new, pragmatic challenges to the usefulness of the techniques. In this paper we are concerned with scaling dynamic partial order reduction, a key technique for mitigating the state space explosion problem, to very large clusters. In particular, we present a new approach for distributed dynamic partial order reduction. Unlike previous work, our approach is based on a novel exploration algorithm that 1) enables trading space complexity for parallelism, 2) achieves efficient load-balancing through time-slicing, 3) provides for fault tolerance, which we consider a mandatory aspect of scalability, 4) scales to more than a thousand parallel workers, and 5) is guaranteed to avoid redundant exploration of overlapping portions of the state space.

FULL PAPER: pdf