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Predicted versus experienced workload and performance on a supervisory control task

The multitask simulation of a supervisory control system was examined in order to evaluate the ability of operators to predict the workload and performance impact of unfamiliar task features, using their basic knowledge and specific information provided before each scenario. Task difficulty and experienced workload were varied by manipulating the number of elements per task, the number of tasks, task schedule, and availability of task elements for performance. The results have indicated that an operator might correctly predict the workload of a realistically complex task if (1) he is familiar with the basic system, and (2) the design, functional requirements, and operational procedures of the proposed modifications are described clearly. He is less able to predict unfamiliar rate or schedule complexity manipulations for which timing is an important element.

Battiste, V.↗

Automatic Halo Management for the Uintah GPU-Heterogeneous Asynchronous Many-Task Runtime

The Uintah computational framework is used for the parallel solution of partial differential equations on adaptive mesh refinement grids using modern supercomputers. Uintah is structured with an application layer and a separate runtime system. Uintah is based on a distributed directed acyclic graph of computational tasks, with a task scheduler that efficiently schedules and executes these tasks on both CPU cores and on-node accelerators. The runtime system identifies task dependencies, creates a task graph prior to the execution of these tasks, automatically generates MPI message tags, and automatically performs halo transfers for simulation variables. Automating halo transfers in a heterogeneous environment poses significant challenges when tasks compute within a few milliseconds, as runtime overhead affects wall time execution, or when simulation variables require large halos spanning most or all of the computational domain, as task dependencies become expensive to process. These challenges are magnified at production scale when application developers require each compute node perform thousands of different halo transfers among thousands simulation variables. The principal contribution of this work is to (1) identify and address inefficiencies that arise when mapping tasks onto the GPU in the presence of automated halo transfers, (2) implement new schemes to reduce runtime system overhead, (3) minimize application developer involvement with the runtime, and (4) show overhead reduction results from these improvements.

Concurrency↗

The Role of Trust and Usability in Enabling Spaceflight Crew Autonomy

Future long duration exploration missions will require an increased use of onboard automated systems as spaceflight crews venture further than before and have longer communications delays with ground support. The design of these systems must support appropriate crew trust and have sufficient usability to enable spaceflight crew autonomy or risk being misused while crews wait to communicate with ground support. We evaluated trust & usability in our self-scheduling tool, Playbook, for crew mission timelines. Data was collected in a controlled lab experiment with 31 participants. Participants in the study conducted two tasks: scheduling, where participants were responsible for scheduling a majority of a day's operational tasks, and rescheduling, where participants were provided a schedule and asked to reschedule higher priority activities. We found a significant correlation between system trust and usability, irrespective of self-scheduling tasks. We conclude that system usability may play a bigger role in how trust is learned while conducting novel crew autonomy tasks such as self-scheduling. Future research should investigate the role of usability to encourage appropriate trust in onboard automated crew systems and enable crew autonomy.

crew autonomy↗

Integrated End-to-end Performance Prediction and Diagnosis for Extreme Scientific Workflows

This report details recent progress for the ASCR funded project “Integrated End-to-end Performance Prediction and Diagnosis for Extreme Scientific Workflows”. We refer to the project as IPPD/2, reflecting the 2017 renewal under expanded scope and partners In IPPD/2, we increased our research scope to include data motion. We are focusing on three major aspects: a) observe how data is generated, distributed, and used; b) analyze how data is (repeatedly) consumed with a focus both on repeated patterns and anomalies; and c) explore how to optimize data motion. This new work on data motion will augment and complement IPPD/2’s research that focused on the computational aspects of tasks. We leverage and extend our existing tools and demonstrate our work on the Belle II workflow suite as well as on workflows from NSLS-II. The highlights of our work are as follows: Provenance for Workflows: Provenance is used to provide information enabling quality control, re-run computational workflows, and reproduce results. IPPD/2 has been building a scalable provenance management system that enables the capture of provenance from the high-level workflow through all relevant system levels in one integrated environment. Leveraging this work, our recent efforts have included using provenance as an enabling technique. Workload characterization: Leveraging provenance and analysis, we characterize data movement within network, storage, and memory over a variety of workloads. This characterization enables an understanding by performance analysts and application developers of the range of behaviors that could be expected. Performance Prediction for Workflows: The goal of modeling distributed workflows is to understand performance bottlenecks and enable more intelligent task scheduling to optimize selected metrics of interest (e.g., task throughput or output data rate). IPPD/2 has utilized both analytical and AI/ML modeling methodologies for performance modeling. Advanced Scheduling and Fault Modeling for Workflows: Scheduling of large-scale scientific workflows on geographically distributed resources is a challenging problem. To improve workflow throughput, we combined novel scheduling algorithms with task predictions from performance modeling and fault modeling. Dynamically Alleviating Bottlenecks in Workflows: Exploiting our provenance, analysis, and modeling efforts, we have explored and developed several techniques for dynamically detecting and alleviating bottlenecks in data movement. In particular, we have spent considerable effort demonstrating our techniques on production-like workflow configurations.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Designing a fuzzy scheduler for hard real-time systems

In hard real-time systems, tasks have to be performed not only correctly, but also in a timely fashion. If timing constraints are not met, there might be severe consequences. Task scheduling is the most important problem in designing a hard real-time system, because the scheduling algorithm ensures that tasks meet their deadlines. However, the inherent nature of uncertainty in dynamic hard real-time systems increases the problems inherent in scheduling. In an effort to alleviate these problems, we have developed a fuzzy scheduler to facilitate searching for a feasible schedule. A set of fuzzy rules are proposed to guide the search. The situation we are trying to address is the performance of the system when no feasible solution can be found, and therefore, certain tasks will not be executed. We wish to limit the number of important tasks that are not scheduled.

Yen, John↗

Requirements and preliminary design for a general purpose real-time executive for flight computers

The requirements and preliminary design of a general purpose, real-time executive computers program for flight computers are provided. A description and the requirements are included for the major elements of the executive: an initialization model, a task scheduler, and an interrupt handler. Task priorities and various process interrupts are discussed. System parameters and variables are identified which make the design adaptable to various flight computer and applicaton specifications.

Smith, K. A.↗

Space station human productivity study. Volume 5: Management plans

The 67 Management Plans represent recommended study approaches for resolving 108 of the 305 Issues which were identified. Each study Management Plan is prepared in three formats: Management Plan Overview (lists the subsumed Issues, study background, and related overview information); Study Plan (details the study approach by tasks, lists special needs, and describes expected study products); Schedule-Task Flow (provides a time-lined schedule for the study tasks and resource requirements). The Management Relationships Matrix, included in this volume, shows the data input-output relationships among all recommended studies. A listing is also included which cross-references the unresolved requirements to Issues to management plans. A glossary of all abbreviations utilized is provided.

Source record↗

Three practical workflow schedulers for easy maximum parallelism

Runtime scheduling and workflow systems are an increasingly popular algorithmic component in HPC because they allow full system utilization with relaxed synchronization requirements. There are so many special-purpose tools for task scheduling, one might wonder why more are needed. Use cases seen on the Summit supercomputer needed better integration with MPI and greater flexibility in job launch configurations. Preparation, execution, and analysis of computational chemistry simulations at the scale of tens of thousands of processors revealed three distinct workflow patterns. A separate job scheduler was implemented for each one using extremely simple and robust designs: file-based, task-list based, and bulk-synchronous. Comparing to existing methods shows unique benefits of this work, including simplicity of design, suitability for HPC centers, short startup time, and well-understood per-task overhead. All three new tools have been shown to scale to full utilization of Summit, and have been made publicly available with tests and documentation. This work presents a complete characterization of the minimum effective task granularity for efficient scheduler usage scenarios. Here, these schedulers have the same bottlenecks, and hence similar task granularities as those reported for existing tools following comparable paradigms.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

An expert system for planning and scheduling in a telerobotic environment

A knowledge based approach to assigning tasks to multi-agents working cooperatively in jobs that require a telerobot in the loop was developed. The generality of the approach allows for such a concept to be applied in a nonteleoperational domain. The planning architecture known as the task oriented planner (TOP) uses the principle of flow mechanism and the concept of planning by deliberation to preserve and use knowledge about a particular task. The TOP is an open ended architecture developed with a NEXPERT expert system shell and its knowledge organization allows for indirect consultation at various levels of task abstraction. Considering that a telerobot operates in a hostile and nonstructured environment, task scheduling should respond to environmental changes. A general heuristic was developed for scheduling jobs with the TOP system. The technique is not to optimize a given scheduling criterion as in classical job and/or flow shop problems. For a teleoperation job schedule, criteria are situation dependent. A criterion selection is fuzzily embedded in the task-skill matrix computation. However, goal achievement with minimum expected risk to the human operator is emphasized.

Ntuen, Celestine A.↗

A coordination theory for intelligent machines

A formal model for the coordination level of intelligent machines is established. The framework of the coordination level investigated consists of one dispatcher and a number of coordinators. The model called coordination structure has been used to describe analytically the information structure and information flow for the coordination activities in the coordination level. Specifically, the coordination structure offers a formalism to (1) describe the task translation of the dispatcher and coordinators; (2) represent the individual process within the dispatcher and coordinators; (3) specify the cooperation and connection among the dispatcher and coordinators; (4) perform the process analysis and evaluation; and (5) provide a control and communication mechanism for the real-time monitor or simulation of the coordination process. A simple procedure for the task scheduling in the coordination structure is presented. The task translation is achieved by a stochastic learning algorithm. The learning process is measured with entropy and its convergence is guaranteed. Finally, a case study of the coordination structure with three coordinators and one dispatcher for a simple intelligent manipulator system illustrates the proposed model and the simulation of the task processes performed on the model verifies the soundness of the theory.

Wang, Fei-Yue↗

Sources of unbounded priority inversions in real-time systems and a comparative study of possible solutions

In the design of real-time systems, tasks are often assigned priorities. Preemptive priority driven schedulers are used to schedule tasks to meet the timing requirements. Priority inversion is the term used to describe the situation when a higher priority task's execution is delayed by lower priority tasks. Priority inversion can occur when there is contention for resources among tasks of different priorities. The duration of priority inversion could be long enough to cause tasks to miss their dead lines. Priority inversion cannot be completely eliminated. However, it is important to identify sources of priority inversion and minimize the duration of priority inversion. In this paper, a comprehensive review of the problem of and solutions to unbounded priority inversion is presented.

Davari, Sadegh↗

Task path planning, scheduling and learning for free-ranging robot systems

The development of robotics applications for space operations is often restricted by the limited movement available to guided robots. Free ranging robots can offer greater flexibility than physically guided robots in these applications. Presented here is an object oriented approach to path planning and task scheduling for free-ranging robots that allows the dynamic determination of paths based on the current environment. The system also provides task learning for repetitive jobs. This approach provides a basis for the design of free-ranging robot systems which are adaptable to various environments and tasks.

Wakefield, G. Steve↗

A sustainable genetic algorithm for satellite resource allocation

A hybrid genetic algorithm is used to schedule tasks for 8 satellites, which can be modelled as a robot whose task is to retrieve objects from a two dimensional field. The objective is to find a schedule that maximizes the value of objects retrieved. Typical of the real-world tasks to which this corresponds is the scheduling of ground contacts for a communications satellite. An important feature of our application is that the amount of time available for running the scheduler is not necessarily known in advance. This requires that the scheduler produce reasonably good results after a short period but that it also continue to improve its results if allowed to run for a longer period. We satisfy this requirement by developing what we call a sustainable genetic algorithm.

Abbott, R. J.↗

Scheduling in the Face of Uncertain Resource Consumption and Utility

We discuss the problem of scheduling tasks that consume uncertain amounts of a resource with known capacity and where the tasks have uncertain utility. In these circumstances, we would like to find schedules that exceed a lower bound on the expected utility when executed. We show that the problems are NP- complete, and present some results that characterize the behavior of some simple heuristics over a variety of problem classes.

Frank, Jeremy↗

Individual differences in strategic flight management and scheduling

A group of 30 instrument-rated pilots was made to fly simulator approaches to three airports under conditions of low, medium, and high workload conditions. An analysis is presently conducted of the difference in discrete task scheduling between the group of 10 highest and 10 lowest performing pilots in the sample; this categorization was based on the mean of various flight-profile measures. The two groups were found to differ from each other only in terms of the time when specific events were conducted, and of the optimality of scheduling for certain high-priority tasks. These results are assessed in view of the relative independence of task-management skills from aircraft-control skills.

Wickens, Christopher D.↗