HCC: Evaluating the Performance of Distributed Synchronous Collaboration Architectures

最近出现了大量工业级的同步协作系统，然而，很少有研究比较它们的分布式体系结构的性能，尽管性能不足可能是一个阻碍。在系统地研究这个建筑设计空间的过程中，这个项目将为当前协作系统设计的“黑艺术”提供一个关键的基础。这将对研究和工业产生广泛的影响。体系结构设计空间将由影响性能的几个体系结构参数（例如，传输协议、服务器配置、I/O调度）、系统参数（例如，网络延迟、处理能力）和任务参数（例如，I/O大小、思考时间）建模。将开发出一些方程，这些方程将给出时间的值，以及诸如加入、离开、响应、反馈和任务完成等关键度量，作为体系结构、系统和任务参数的函数。实验将使用不同类型的协作日志（如多用户演示、聊天和科学可视化）来验证这些方程。这种新颖的实验测试平台将使以前不可能进行的性能比较成为可能。更广泛的影响：从这项研究中得出的分析模型将允许应用程序和基础设施开发人员确定他们应该实现的体系结构的范围。它将使科学家、工程师、作家和协作技术的其他用户更好地理解设计空间，以便他们能够选择适合自己需求的正确架构，同时欣赏这种选择的性能结果。此外，项目基础设施将形成第一个概念验证系统，支持协作体系结构的整个空间，一个用于实验的新颖研究测试平台，以及一个用于教授协作体系结构的工具。为这些实验创建的多用户活动日志将被公开，以便它们可以成为学术和工业研究中的基准，用于比较新架构的性能。

There has been a recent proliferation of industrial-strength synchronous collaborative systems, however, there has been little research comparing the performance of their distributed architectures, even though inadequate performance can be a show-stopper. In systematically examining this architectural design space, this project will provide a critical foundation for what is currently the ''black art'' of collaborative system design. This will have broad ranging impact in both research and industry. The architecture design space will be modeled by several architecture parameters (e.g., transport protocol, server configuration, I/O scheduling), system parameters (e.g., network latency, processing power) and task parameters (e.g., I/O size, think time) that impact performance. Equations will be developed that give the value of the time, along key metrics such as join, leave, response, feedthrough, and task-completion, as a function of the architecture, system, and task parameters. Experiments will be performed to validate these equations using logs of different kinds of collaborations such as multi-user presentations, chats, and scientific visualizations. This novel experimental test bed will enable performance comparisons that have not been possible before. Broader impact: The analytic model resulting from this research will allow application and infrastructure developers to determine the range of architectures they should implement. It will provide scientists, engineers, writers, and other users of collaboration technology a better understanding of the design space so they can choose the correct architecture to fit their needs while appreciating the performance consequences of that choice. In addition, the project infrastructure will form the first proof-of-concept system supporting the entire space of collaborative architectures, a novel research test-bed for experimentation, and a vehicle for teaching collaboration architectures. The multi-user activity logs created for these experiments will be publicized so that they can become benchmarks, in both academic and industrial research, used to compare performance of new architectures.