Xiao Qin's Software

ORCA: An Offloading Framework for
I/O-Intensive Applications on Clusters

Publication

If you use our ORCA software to conduct your research, please cite our paper and software in your publications. We highly appreciate if you give us the credit.

The deatils on the ORCA framework can be found in our paper listed below:

J. Zhang, X.-F. Jiang, M. I. Alghamdi, M. Al Assaf, Y. Tian, X. Qin, and M, Qiu, “ORCA: An Offloading Framework for I/O-Intensive Applications on Clusters,” Proc. the 31th IEEE International Performance Computing and Communications Conference (IPCCC), Nov. 2012. [PDF]

Introduction

This offloading library enables users easily applying offloading technology to either an existing or a newly developed I/O-intensive application with minor efforts. The library is RPC-based that it highlights the offloading semantics by a small number of interfaces. It suports C and C++ applications.

Do you have questions on ORCA?

For questions please contact Ji Zhang at jzz0014@auburn.edu or Xiao Qin at xqin@auburn.edu

Download

You can download a tarball (i.e., a gzipped tar file) of our ORCA platform here:

• offloading.tar.gz

Unpack it with the following commands, and look for a README to get you started.

    unzip offloading.tar.gz
    tar -xvf offloading.tar 

You can download each individual source code file of our ORCA platform here:

• makefile
• offloading.h
• offloading_rpc.h
• client.c
• func_mapping.c
• init.c
• offloading_call.c
• offloading_xdr.c
• serilization_helper.c
• server.c

 

Library Generation

• After entering the directory of the library, you can execute "make" to generate library files.
• When compiling and linking processes, the library file, "liboffloading.a", is generated in "lib" directory. All intermediate object files are stored in "obj" directory.

Usage

• Two files are used in an offloading project. "offloading.h" includes declaration of offloading interfaces that may used in other files. "liboffloading.a" is the library file that implements offloading. It will be linked with other files.

• Please execute the offloading program at first with giving "server" as the last argument in the command. The library will erase the argument after initialization.

• An offloading inverted index application that gives a good example is available. Please download the tarball of this application here:
  

         offloading_II.tar.gz

• Unpack the gzipped tar file with the following commands, and look for a README to compile and run this application. 

   
    unzip offloading_II.tar.gz
    tar -xvf offloading_II.tar 

Copyright and Disclaimer

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

Acknowledgments

This software is based upon work supported by the US National Science Foundation under Grants CCF-0845257 (CAREER), CNS-0917137 (CSR), CNS-0757778 (CSR), CCF-0742187 (CPA), CNS-0831502 (CyberTrust), CNS-0855251 (CRI), OCI-0753305 (CI-TEAM), DUE-0837341 (CCLI), and DUE-0830831 (SFS).

Updated on 11/19/2013.