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1. Distributed Learning-based Stability Assessment for Large Scale Networks of Dissipative Systems

   https://doi.org/10.1109/CDC45484.2021.9683774  

   Jena, Amit; Huang, Tong; Sivaranjani, S.; Kalathil, Dileep; Xie, Le (December 2021, IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC))

   We propose a new distributed learning-based framework for stability assessment of a class of networked nonlinear systems, where each subsystem is dissipative. The aim is to learn, in a distributed manner, a Lyapunov function and associated region of attraction for the networked system. We begin by using a neural network function approximation to learn a storage function for each subsystem such that the subsystem satisfies a local dissipativity property. We next use a satisfiability modulo theories (SMT) solver based falsifier that verifies the local dissipativity of each subsystem by deter- mining an absence of counterexamples that violate the local dissipativity property, as established by the neural network approximation. Finally, we verify network-level stability by using an alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) approach to update the storage function of each subsystem in a distributed manner until a global stability condition for the network of dissipative subsystems is satisfied. This step also leads to a network-level Lyapunov function that we then use to estimate a region of attraction. We illustrate the proposed algorithm and its advantages on a microgrid interconnection with power electronics interfaces. 

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2. Incentivizing effort in interdependent security games using resource pooling

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3338506.3340272  

   Khalili, Mohammad Mahdi; Zhang, Xueru; Liu, Mingyan (June 2019, Proceedings of the 14th Workshop on the Economics of Networks, Systems and Computation)

   We consider an InterDependent Security (IDS) game with networked agents and positive externality where each agent chooses an effort/investment level for securing itself. The agents are interdependent in that the state of security of one agent depends not only on its own investment but also on the other agents' effort/investment. Due to the positive externality, the agents under-invest in security which leads to an inefficient Nash equilibrium (NE). While much has been analyzed in the literature on the under-investment issue, in this study we take a different angle. Specifically, we consider the possibility of allowing agents to pool their resources, i.e., allowing agents to have the ability to both invest in themselves as well as in other agents. We show that the interaction of strategic and selfish agents under resource pooling (RP) improves the agents' effort/investment level as well as their utility as compared to a scenario without resource pooling. We show that the social welfare (total utility) at the NE of the game with resource pooling is higher than the maximum social welfare attainable in a game without resource pooling but by using an optimal incentive mechanism. Furthermore, we show that while voluntary participation in this latter scenario is not generally true, it is guaranteed under resource pooling. 

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3. POSH: A Data-Aware Shell

   Raghavan, Deepti; Fouladi, Sadjad; Levis, Philip; and Zaharia, Matei. (July 2020, USENIX ATC 2020)

   null (Ed.)

   We present POSH, a framework that accelerates shell applications with I/O-heavy components, such as data analytics with command-line utilities. Remote storage such as networked filesystems can severely limit the performance of these applications: data makes a round trip over the network for relatively little computation at the client. Reducing the data movement by moving the code to the data can improve performance. POSH automatically optimizes unmodified I/O-intensive shell applications running over remote storage by offloading the I/O-intensive portions to proxy servers closer to the data. A proxy can run directly on a storage server, or on a machine closer to the storage layer than the client. POSH intercepts shell pipelines and uses metadata called annotations to decide where to run each command within the pipeline. We address three principal challenges that arise: an annotation language that allows POSH to understand which files a command will access, a scheduling algorithm that places commands to minimize data movement, and a system runtime to execute a distributed schedule but retain local semantics. We benchmark POSH on real shell pipelines such as image processing, network security analysis, log analysis, distributed system debugging, and git. We find that POSH provides speedups ranging from 1.6× to 15× compared to NFS, without requiring any modifications to the applications. 

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4. Inducing Equilibria in Networked Public Goods Games through Network Structure Modification

   Kempe, David; Yu, Sixie; Vorobeychik, Yevgeniy (January 2020, International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS))

   Networked public goods games model scenarios in which self-interested agents decide whether or how much to invest in an action that benefits not only themselves, but also their network neighbors. Examples include vaccination, security investment, and crime reporting. While every agent's utility is increasing in their neighbors' joint investment, the specific form can vary widely depending on the scenario. A principal, such as a policymaker, may wish to induce large investment from the agents. Besides direct incentives, an important lever here is the network structure itself: by adding and removing edges, for example, through community meetings, the principal can change the nature of the utility functions, resulting in different, and perhaps socially preferable, equilibrium outcomes. We initiate an algorithmic study of targeted network modifications with the goal of inducing equilibria of a particular form. We study this question for a variety of equilibrium forms (induce all agents to invest, at least a given set S, exactly a given set S, at least k agents), and for a variety of utility functions. While we show that the problem is NP-complete for a number of these scenarios, we exhibit a broad array of scenarios in which the problem can be solved in polynomial time by non-trivial reductions to (minimum-cost) matching problems. 

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5. Skyhook: Towards an Arrow-Native Storage System

   https://doi.org/10.1109/CCGrid54584.2022.00017  

   Chakraborty, Jayjeet; Jimenez, Ivo; Rodriguez, Sebastiaan Alvarez; Uta, Alexandru; LeFevre, Jeff; Maltzahn, Carlos (May 2022, The 22nd IEEE/ACM Interna- tional Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Internet Computing (CCGrid22))

   With the ever-increasing dataset sizes, several file formats such as Parquet, ORC, and Avro have been developed to store data efficiently, save the network, and interconnect bandwidth at the price of additional CPU utilization. However, with the advent of networks supporting 25-100 Gb/s and storage devices delivering 1,000,000 reqs/sec, the CPU has become the bottleneck trying to keep up feeding data in and out of these fast devices. The result is that data access libraries executed on single clients are often CPU-bound and cannot utilize the scale-out benefits of distributed storage systems. One attractive solution to this problem is to offload data-reducing processing and filtering tasks to the storage layer. However, modifying legacy storage systems to support compute offloading is often tedious and requires an extensive understanding of the system internals. Previous approaches re-implemented functionality of data processing frameworks and access libraries for a particular storage system, a duplication of effort that might have to be repeated for different storage systems. This paper introduces a new design paradigm that allows extending programmable object storage systems to embed existing, widely used data processing frameworks and access libraries into the storage layer with no modifications. In this approach, data processing frameworks and access libraries can evolve independently from storage systems while leveraging distributed storage systems’ scale-out and availability properties. We present Skyhook, an example implementation of our design paradigm using Ceph, Apache Arrow, and Parquet. We provide a brief performance evaluation of Skyhook and discuss key results. 

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