1,721,113 research outputs found
Recent advances in energy efficient query processing
Web search companies distribute their infrastructures and operations across several, geographically distant data centers. This distributed architecture facilitates high performance query processing, which is fundamental for the success of a Web search engine. At the same time, data centers require an huge amount of electricity to operate their computing resources. In this extended abstract, we briey discuss our recent works for improving the energy efficiency of query processing systems. Firstly, we introduce a novel query forwarding algorithm which exploits green energy sources to reduce the electricity expenditure and carbon footprint of Web search engines. Then, we propose to delegate the CPU power management from a server' operative system directly to the query processing application, to reduce the energy consumption of a search engine's servers. Finally, we introduce PESOS, a scheduling algorithm which manages the CPU power consumption on a per-query basis while considering query latency constraints
A study on query energy consumption in web search engines
Commercial web search engines are usually deployed on data centers, which leverage thousands of servers to eficiently answer queries on a large scale. Thanks to these distributed infrastructures, search engines can quickly serve high query volumes. However, the energy consumed by these many servers poses economical and environmental challenges for the Web search engine companies. To tackle such challenges, we advocate the importance of quantifying the energy consumption of a search engine. Therefore, in this study we experimentally analyze energy consumption on a per query basis. Our aim is to evaluate how much energy is consumed by a search server to answer a single query, i.e, its query energy consumption. To perform such measurements, experiments are conducted using the TREC ClueWeb09 collection and the MSN 2006 query log. Results suggest that solving queries require an amount of energy directly proportional to the query processing time
Multiple query processing via logic function factoring
Some extensions to search systems require support for multiple query processing. This is the case with query variations, i.e., differ- ent query formulations of the same information need. The results of their processing can be fused together to improve effectiveness, but this requires to traverse more than once the query terms’ post- ing lists, thus prolonging the multiple query processing time. In this work, we propose an approach to optimize the processing of query variations to reduce their overall response time. Similarly to the standard Boolean model, we firstly represent a group of query variations as a logic function where Boolean variables represent query terms. We then apply factoring to such function, in order to produce a more compact but logically equivalent representation. The factored form is used to process the query variations in a single pass over the inverted index. We experimentally show that our approach can improve by up to 1.95× the mean processing time of a multiple query with no statistically significant degradation in terms of NDCG@10
Exploiting green energy to reduce the operational costs of multi-center web search engines
Carbon dioxide emissions resulting from fossil fuels (brown energy) combustion are the main cause of global warming due to the greenhouse effect. Large IT companies have re- cently increased their efforts in reducing the carbon dioxide footprint originated from their data center electricity con- sumption. On one hand, better infrastructure and mod- ern hardware allow for a more efficient usage of electric re- sources. On the other hand, data-centers can be powered by renewable sources (green energy) that are both environ- mental friendly and economically convenient.
In this paper, we tackle the problem of targeting the us- age of green energy to minimize the expenditure of running multi-center Web search engines, i.e., systems composed by multiple, geographically remote, computing facilities.
We propose a mathematical model to minimize the op- erational costs of multi-center Web search engines by ex- ploiting renewable energies whenever available at different locations. Using this model, we design an algorithm which decides what fraction of the incoming query load arriving into one processing facility must be forwarded to be pro- cessed at different sites to use green energy sources.
We experiment using real traffic from a large search engine and we compare our model against state of the art baselines for query forwarding. Our experimental results show that the proposed solution maintains an high query throughput, while reducing by up to ∼25% the energy operational costs of multi-center search engines. Additionally, our algorithm can reduce the brown energy consumption by almost 6% when energy-proportional servers are employed
Energy-Efficient Query Processing in Web Search Engines
Web search engines are composed by thousands of query processing nodes, i.e., servers dedicated to process user queries. Such many servers consume a significant amount of energy, mostly accountable to their CPUs, but they are necessary to ensure low latencies, since users expect sub-second response times (e.g., 500 ms). However, users can hardly notice response times that are faster than their expectations. Hence, we propose the Predictive Energy Saving Online Scheduling Algorithm (PESOS) to select the most appropriate CPU frequency to process a query on a per-core basis. PESOS aims at process queries by their deadlines, and leverage high-level scheduling information to reduce the CPU energy consumption of a query processing node. PESOS bases its decision on query efficiency predictors, estimating the processing volume and processing time of a query. We experimentally evaluate PESOS upon the TREC ClueWeb09B collection and the MSN2006 query log. Results show that PESOS can reduce the CPU energy consumption of a query processing node up to 20 percent energy saving, while the competitor requires a fine parameter tuning and it may incurs in uncontrollable latency violations
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
We provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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