arXiv subjects

Andre Luckow

Publications and source records attributed to Andre Luckow.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

Quantum Computing Techniques for Multi-Knapsack Problems

Optimization problems are ubiquitous in various industrial settings, and multi-knapsack optimization is one recurrent task faced daily by several industries. The advent of quantum computing has opened a new paradigm for computationally intensive tasks, with promises of delivering better and faster solutions for specific classes of problems. This work presents a comprehensive study of quantum computing approaches for multi-knapsack problems, by investigating some of the most prominent and state-of-the-art quantum algorithms using different quantum software and hardware tools. The performance of the quantum approaches is compared for varying hyperparameters. We consider several gate-based quantum algorithms, such as QAOA and VQE, as well as quantum annealing, and present an exhaustive study of the solutions and the estimation of runtimes. Additionally, we analyze the impact of warm-starting QAOA to understand the reasons for the better performance of this approach. We discuss the implications of our results in view of utilizing quantum optimization for industrial applications in the future. In addition to the high demand for better quantum hardware, our results also emphasize the necessity of more and better quantum optimization algorithms, especially for multi-knapsack problems.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

A Conceptual Architecture for a Quantum-HPC Middleware

Quantum computing promises potential for science and industry by solving certain computationally complex problems faster than classical computers. Quantum computing systems evolved from monolithic systems towards modular architectures comprising multiple quantum processing units (QPUs) coupled to classical computing nodes (HPC). With the increasing scale, middleware systems that facilitate the efficient coupling of quantum-classical computing are becoming critical. Through an in-depth analysis of quantum applications, integration patterns and systems, we identified a gap in understanding Quantum-HPC middleware systems. We present a conceptual middleware to facilitate reasoning about quantum-classical integration and serve as the basis for a future middleware system. An essential contribution of this paper lies in leveraging well-established high-performance computing abstractions for managing workloads, tasks, and resources to integrate quantum computing into HPC systems seamlessly.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

Application-Oriented Benchmarking of Quantum Generative Learning Using QUARK

Benchmarking of quantum machine learning (QML) algorithms is challenging due to the complexity and variability of QML systems, e.g., regarding model ansatzes, data sets, training techniques, and hyper-parameters selection. The QUantum computing Application benchmaRK (QUARK) framework simplifies and standardizes benchmarking studies for quantum computing applications. Here, we propose several extensions of QUARK to include the ability to evaluate the training and deployment of quantum generative models. We describe the updated software architecture and illustrate its flexibility through several example applications: (1) We trained different quantum generative models using several circuit ansatzes, data sets, and data transformations. (2) We evaluated our models on GPU and real quantum hardware. (3) We assessed the generalization capabilities of our generative models using a broad set of metrics that capture, e.g., the novelty and validity of the generated data.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

Workflows Community Summit 2022: A Roadmap Revolution

Scientific workflows have become integral tools in broad scientific computing use cases. Science discovery is increasingly dependent on workflows to orchestrate large and complex scientific experiments that range from execution of a cloud-based data preprocessing pipeline to multi-facility instrument-to-edge-to-HPC computational workflows. Given the changing landscape of scientific computing and the evolving needs of emerging scientific applications, it is paramount that the development of novel scientific workflows and system functionalities seek to increase the efficiency, resilience, and pervasiveness of existing systems and applications. Specifically, the proliferation of machine learning/artificial intelligence (ML/AI) workflows, need for processing large scale datasets produced by instruments at the edge, intensification of near real-time data processing, support for long-term experiment campaigns, and emergence of quantum computing as an adjunct to HPC, have significantly changed the functional and operational requirements of workflow systems. Workflow systems now need to, for example, support data streams from the edge-to-cloud-to-HPC enable the management of many small-sized files, allow data reduction while ensuring high accuracy, orchestrate distributed services (workflows, instruments, data movement, provenance, publication, etc.) across computing and user facilities, among others. Further, to accelerate science, it is also necessary that these systems implement specifications/standards and APIs for seamless (horizontal and vertical) integration between systems and applications, as well as enabling the publication of workflows and their associated products according to the FAIR principles. This document reports on discussions and findings from the 2022 international edition of the Workflows Community Summit that took place on November 29 and 30, 2022.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2022

Exploring privacy-enhancing technologies in the automotive value chain

Privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) are becoming increasingly crucial for addressing customer needs, security, privacy (e.g., enhancing anonymity and confidentiality), and regulatory requirements. However, applying PETs in organizations requires a precise understanding of use cases, technologies, and limitations. This paper investigates several industrial use cases, their characteristics, and the potential applicability of PETs to these. We conduct expert interviews to identify and classify uses cases, a gray literature review of relevant open-source PET tools, and discuss how the use case characteristics can be addressed using PETs' capabilities. While we focus mainly on automotive use cases, the results also apply to other use case domains.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2022

QUARK: A Framework for Quantum Computing Application Benchmarking

Quantum computing (QC) is anticipated to provide a speedup over classical HPC approaches for specific problems in optimization, simulation, and machine learning. With the advances in quantum computing toward practical applications, the need to analyze and compare different quantum solutions increases. While different low-level benchmarks for QC exist, these benchmarks do not provide sufficient insights into real-world application-level performance. We propose an application-centric benchmark method and the QUantum computing Application benchmaRK (QUARK) framework to foster the investigation and creation of application benchmarks for QC. This paper establishes three significant contributions: (1) it makes a case for application-level benchmarks and provides an in-depth "pen and paper" benchmark formulation of two reference problems: robot path and vehicle option optimization from the industrial domain; (2) it proposes the open-source QUARK framework for designing, implementing, executing, and analyzing benchmarks; (3) it provides multiple reference implementations for these two reference problems based on different known, and where needed, extended, classical and quantum algorithmic approaches and analyzes their performance on different types of infrastructures.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2022

Revealing the Landscape of Privacy-Enhancing Technologies in the Context of Data Markets for the IoT: A Systematic Literature Review

IoT data markets in public and private institutions have become increasingly relevant in recent years because of their potential to improve data availability and unlock new business models. However, exchanging data in markets bears considerable challenges related to disclosing sensitive information. Despite considerable research focused on different aspects of privacy-enhancing data markets for the IoT, none of the solutions proposed so far seems to find a practical adoption. Thus, this study aims to organize the state-of-the-art solutions, analyze and scope the technologies that have been suggested in this context, and structure the remaining challenges to determine areas where future research is required. To accomplish this goal, we conducted a systematic literature review on privacy enhancement in data markets for the IoT, covering 50 publications dated up to July 2020, and provided updates with 24 publications dated up to May 2022. Our results indicate that most research in this area has emerged only recently, and no IoT data market architecture has established itself as canonical. Existing solutions frequently lack the required combination of anonymization and secure computation technologies. Furthermore, there is no consensus on the appropriate use of blockchain technology for IoT data markets and a low degree of leveraging existing libraries or reusing generic data market architectures. We also identified significant challenges remaining, such as the copy problem and the recursive enforcement problem that-while solutions have been suggested to some extent-are often not sufficiently addressed in proposed designs. We conclude that privacy-enhancing technologies need further improvements to positively impact data markets so that, ultimately, the value of data is preserved through data scarcity and users' privacy and businesses-critical information are protected.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2022

Optimization of Robot Trajectory Planning with Nature-Inspired and Hybrid Quantum Algorithms

We solve robot trajectory planning problems at industry-relevant scales. Our end-to-end solution integrates highly versatile random-key algorithms with model stacking and ensemble techniques, as well as path relinking for solution refinement. The core optimization module consists of a biased random-key genetic algorithm. Through a distinct separation of problem-independent and problem-dependent modules, we achieve an efficient problem representation, with a native encoding of constraints. We show that generalizations to alternative algorithmic paradigms such as simulated annealing are straightforward. We provide numerical benchmark results for industry-scale data sets. Our approach is found to consistently outperform greedy baseline results. To assess the capabilities of today's quantum hardware, we complement the classical approach with results obtained on quantum annealing hardware, using qbsolv on Amazon Braket. Finally, we show how the latter can be integrated into our larger pipeline, providing a quantum-ready hybrid solution to the problem.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2022

CRGC -- A Practical Framework for Constructing Reusable Garbled Circuits

In this work, we introduce two schemes to construct reusable garbled circuits (RGCs) in the semi-honest setting. Our completely reusable garbled circuit (CRGC) scheme allows the generator (party A) to construct and send an obfuscated boolean circuit along with an encoded input to the evaluator (party B). In contrast to Yao's Garbled Circuit protocol, B can securely evaluate the same CRGC with an arbitrary number of inputs. As a tradeoff, CRGCs predictably leak some input bits of A to B. We also propose a partially reusable garbled circuit (PRGC) scheme that divides a circuit into reusable and non-reusable sections. PRGCs do not leak input bits of A. We benchmark our CRGC implementation against the state-of-the-art garbled circuit libraries EMP SH2PC and TinyGarble2. Using our framework, evaluating a CRGC is up to twenty times faster, albeit with weaker privacy guarantees, than evaluating an equivalent garbled circuit constructed by the two existing libraries. Our open-source library can convert any C++ function to a CRGC at approx. 80 million gates per second and repeatedly evaluate a CRGC at approx. 350 million gates per second. Additionally, a compressed CRGC is approx. 75% smaller in file size than the unobfuscated boolean circuit.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2021

Exploring Task Placement for Edge-to-Cloud Applications using Emulation

A vast and growing number of IoT applications connect physical devices, such as scientific instruments, technical equipment, machines, and cameras, across heterogenous infrastructure from the edge to the cloud to provide responsive, intelligent services while complying with privacy and security requirements. However, the integration of heterogeneous IoT, edge, and cloud technologies and the design of end-to-end applications that seamlessly work across multiple layers and types of infrastructures is challenging. A significant issue is resource management and the need to ensure that the right type and scale of resources is allocated on every layer to fulfill the application's processing needs. As edge and cloud layers are increasingly tightly integrated, imbalanced resource allocations and sub-optimally placed tasks can quickly deteriorate the overall system performance. This paper proposes an emulation approach for the investigation of task placements across the edge-to-cloud continuum. We demonstrate that emulation can address the complexity and many degrees-of-freedom of the problem, allowing us to investigate essential deployment patterns and trade-offs. We evaluate our approach using a machine learning-based workload, demonstrating the validity by comparing emulation and real-world experiments. Further, we show that the right task placement strategy has a significant impact on performance -- in our experiments, between 5% and 65% depending on the scenario.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2021

Pilot-Edge: Distributed Resource Management Along the Edge-to-Cloud Continuum

Many science and industry IoT applications necessitate data processing across the edge-to-cloud continuum to meet performance, security, cost, and privacy requirements. However, diverse abstractions and infrastructures for managing resources and tasks across the edge-to-cloud scenario are required. We propose Pilot-Edge as a common abstraction for resource management across the edge-to-cloud continuum. Pilot-Edge is based on the pilot abstraction, which decouples resource and workload management, and provides a Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) interface for application-level tasks. The abstraction allows applications to encapsulate common functions in high-level tasks that can then be configured and deployed across the continuum. We characterize Pilot-Edge on geographically distributed infrastructures using machine learning workloads (e.g., k-means and auto-encoders). Our experiments demonstrate how Pilot-Edge manages distributed resources and allows applications to evaluate task placement based on multiple factors (e.g., model complexities, throughput, and latency).

cs.DC↗

arXiv2021

Quantum Computing: Towards Industry Reference Problems

The complexity is increasing rapidly in many areas of the automotive industry. The design of an automobile involves many different engineering disciplines, e. g., mechanical, electrical, and software engineering. The software of a vehicle comprises millions of lines of code. Further, the manufacturing, logistics, distribution, and sales of a vehicle are highly complex. There is an immense need for solving simulation problems, e. g., in battery chemistry, an essential enabler for technological advancements for electric vehicles. In all these domains, myriads of optimization, simulation, and machine learning problems arise. Quantum computing-based approaches promise to overcome some of the inherent scalability limitations of classical approaches. This article investigates quantum computing applications across the automotive value chain and identifies several high-value problems that will benefit from quantum-enhanced solutions.

cs.ET↗

arXiv2020

Methods and Experiences for Developing Abstractions for Data-intensive, Scientific Applications

Developing software for scientific applications that require the integration of diverse types of computing, instruments, and data present challenges that are distinct from commercial software. These applications require scale, and the need to integrate various programming and computational models with evolving and heterogeneous infrastructure. Pervasive and effective abstractions for distributed infrastructures are thus critical; however, the process of developing abstractions for scientific applications and infrastructures is not well understood. While theory-based approaches for system development are suited for well-defined, closed environments, they have severe limitations for designing abstractions for scientific systems and applications. The design science research (DSR) method provides the basis for designing practical systems that can handle real-world complexities at all levels. In contrast to theory-centric approaches, DSR emphasizes both practical relevance and knowledge creation by building and rigorously evaluating all artifacts. We show how DSR provides a well-defined framework for developing abstractions and middleware systems for distributed systems. Specifically, we address the critical problem of distributed resource management on heterogeneous infrastructure over a dynamic range of scales, a challenge that currently limits many scientific applications. We use the pilot-abstraction, a widely used resource management abstraction for high-performance, high throughput, big data, and streaming applications, as a case study for evaluating the DSR activities. For this purpose, we analyze the research process and artifacts produced during the design and evaluation of the pilot-abstraction. We find DSR provides a concise framework for iteratively designing and evaluating systems. Finally, we capture our experiences and formulate different lessons learned.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2019

Performance Characterization and Modeling of Serverless and HPC Streaming Applications

Experiment-in-the-Loop Computing (EILC) requires support for numerous types of processing and the management of heterogeneous infrastructure over a dynamic range of scales: from the edge to the cloud and HPC, and intermediate resources. Serverless is an emerging service that combines high-level middleware services, such as distributed execution engines for managing tasks, with low-level infrastructure. It offers the potential of usability and scalability, but adds to the complexity of managing heterogeneous and dynamic resources. In response, we extend Pilot-Streaming to support serverless platforms. Pilot-Streaming provides a unified abstraction for resource management for HPC, cloud, and serverless, and allocates resource containers independent of the application workload removing the need to write resource-specific code. Understanding of the performance and scaling characteristics of streaming applications and infrastructure presents another challenge for EILC. StreamInsight provides insight into the performance of streaming applications and infrastructure, their selection, configuration and scaling behavior. Underlying StreamInsight is the universal scalability law, which permits the accurate quantification of scalability properties of streaming applications. Using experiments on HPC and AWS Lambda, we demonstrate that StreamInsight provides an accurate model for a variety of application characteristics, e.g., machine learning model sizes and resource configurations.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2018

Pilot-Streaming: A Stream Processing Framework for High-Performance Computing

An increasing number of scientific applications rely on stream processing for generating timely insights from data feeds of scientific instruments, simulations, and Internet-of-Thing (IoT) sensors. The development of streaming applications is a complex task and requires the integration of heterogeneous, distributed infrastructure, frameworks, middleware and application components. Different application components are often written in different languages using different abstractions and frameworks. Often, additional components, such as a message broker (e.g. Kafka), are required to decouple data production and consumptions and avoiding issues, such as back-pressure. Streaming applications may be extremely dynamic due to factors, such as variable data rates caused by the data source, adaptive sampling techniques or network congestions, variable processing loads caused by usage of different machine learning algorithms. As a result application-level resource management that can respond to changes in one of these factors is critical. We propose Pilot-Streaming, a framework for supporting streaming frameworks, applications and their resource management needs on HPC infrastructure. Pilot-Streaming is based on the Pilot-Job concept and enables developers to manage distributed computing and data resources for complex streaming applications. It enables applications to dynamically respond to resource requirements by adding/removing resources at runtime. This capability is critical for balancing complex streaming pipelines. To address the complexity in developing and characterization of streaming applications, we present the Streaming Mini- App framework, which supports different plug-able algorithms for data generation and processing, e.g., for reconstructing light source images using different techniques. We utilize the Mini-App framework to conduct an evaluation of Pilot-Streaming.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2018

Task-parallel Analysis of Molecular Dynamics Trajectories

Different parallel frameworks for implementing data analysis applications have been proposed by the HPC and Big Data communities. In this paper, we investigate three task-parallel frameworks: Spark, Dask and RADICAL-Pilot with respect to their ability to support data analytics on HPC resources and compare them with MPI. We investigate the data analysis requirements of Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations which are significant consumers of supercomputing cycles, producing immense amounts of data. A typical large-scale MD simulation of a physical system of O(100k) atoms over μsecs can produce from O(10) GB to O(1000) GBs of data. We propose and evaluate different approaches for parallelization of a representative set of MD trajectory analysis algorithms, in particular the computation of path similarity and leaflet identification. We evaluate Spark, Dask and RADICAL-Pilot with respect to their abstractions and runtime engine capabilities to support these algorithms. We provide a conceptual basis for comparing and understanding different frameworks that enable users to select the optimal system for each application. We also provide a quantitative performance analysis of the different algorithms across the three frameworks.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2017

Deep Learning in the Automotive Industry: Applications and Tools

Deep Learning refers to a set of machine learning techniques that utilize neural networks with many hidden layers for tasks, such as image classification, speech recognition, language understanding. Deep learning has been proven to be very effective in these domains and is pervasively used by many Internet services. In this paper, we describe different automotive uses cases for deep learning in particular in the domain of computer vision. We surveys the current state-of-the-art in libraries, tools and infrastructures (e.\,g.\ GPUs and clouds) for implementing, training and deploying deep neural networks. We particularly focus on convolutional neural networks and computer vision use cases, such as the visual inspection process in manufacturing plants and the analysis of social media data. To train neural networks, curated and labeled datasets are essential. In particular, both the availability and scope of such datasets is typically very limited. A main contribution of this paper is the creation of an automotive dataset, that allows us to learn and automatically recognize different vehicle properties. We describe an end-to-end deep learning application utilizing a mobile app for data collection and process support, and an Amazon-based cloud backend for storage and training. For training we evaluate the use of cloud and on-premises infrastructures (including multiple GPUs) in conjunction with different neural network architectures and frameworks. We assess both the training times as well as the accuracy of the classifier. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the trained classifier in a real world setting during manufacturing process.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2016

Algebraic multigrid support vector machines

The support vector machine is a flexible optimization-based technique widely used for classification problems. In practice, its training part becomes computationally expensive on large-scale data sets because of such reasons as the complexity and number of iterations in parameter fitting methods, underlying optimization solvers, and nonlinearity of kernels. We introduce a fast multilevel framework for solving support vector machine models that is inspired by the algebraic multigrid. Significant improvement in the running has been achieved without any loss in the quality. The proposed technique is highly beneficial on imbalanced sets. We demonstrate computational results on publicly available and industrial data sets.

stat.ML↗