FCPP Process Management

Project for developing and demonstrating process management techniques.

All commands below are assumed to be issued from the cloned git repository folder. For any issues with reproducing the experiments, please contact Giorgio Audrito.

References

• FCPP main website: https://fcpp.github.io.
• FCPP documentation: http://fcpp-doc.surge.sh.
• FCPP presentation paper: http://giorgio.audrito.info/static/fcpp.pdf.
• FCPP sources: https://github.com/fcpp/fcpp.

Setup

The next sections contain the setup instructions based on the CMake build system for the various supported OSs and virtual containers. Jump to the section dedicated to your system of choice and ignore the others.

Windows

Pre-requisites:

• MSYS2
• Asymptote (for building the plots)
• Doxygen (for building the documentation)

At this point, run "MSYS2 MinGW x64" from the start menu; a terminal will appear. Run the following commands:

pacman -Syu

After updating packages, the terminal will close. Open it again, and then type:

pacman -Sy --noconfirm --needed base-devel mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain mingw-w64-x86_64-cmake mingw-w64-x86_64-make git

The build system should now be available from the "MSYS2 MinGW x64" terminal.

Linux

Pre-requisites:

• Xorg-dev package (X11)
• G++ 9 (or higher)
• CMake 3.18 (or higher)
• Asymptote (for building the plots)
• Doxygen (for building the documentation)

To install these packages in Ubuntu, type the following command:

sudo apt-get install xorg-dev g++ cmake asymptote doxygen

In Fedora, the xorg-dev package is not available. Instead, install the packages:

libX11-devel libXinerama-devel.x86_6 libXcursor-devel.x86_64 libXi-devel.x86_64 libXrandr-devel.x86_64 mesa-libGL-devel.x86_64

MacOS

Pre-requisites:

• Xcode Command Line Tools
• CMake 3.18 (or higher)
• Asymptote (for building the plots)
• Doxygen (for building the documentation)

To install them, assuming you have the brew package manager, type the following commands:

xcode-select --install
brew install cmake asymptote doxygen

Graphical User Interface

Executing a graphical simulation will open a window displaying the simulation scenario, initially still: you can start running the simulation by pressing P (current simulated time is displayed in the bottom-left corner). While the simulation is running, network statistics may be periodically printed in the console, and be possibly aggregated in form of an Asymptote plot at simulation end. You can interact with the simulation through the following keys:

• Esc to end the simulation
• P to stop/resume
• O/I to speed-up/slow-down simulated time
• L to show/hide connection links between nodes
• G to show/hide the grid on the reference plane and node pins
• M enables/disables the marker for selecting nodes
• left-click on a selected node to open a window with node details
• C resets the camera to the starting position
• Q,W,E,A,S,D to move the simulation area along orthogonal axes
• right-click+mouse drag to rotate the camera
• mouse scroll for zooming in and out
• left-shift added to the camera commands above for precision control
• any other key will show/hide a legenda displaying this list

Hovering on a node will also display its UID in the top-left corner.

Simulations

Graphic

./make.sh window

Runs a single test simulation with GUI for each of the following scenarios:

• spherical topology
• tree topology
• tree topology exploiting Bloom filters

Parameters (cf. plots)

• dens density of the network as avg number of neighbours
• hops network diameter
• speed maximum speed of devices as a percentage of the communication speed
• tvar variance of the round durations, as a percentage of the avg

Metrics (cf. plots)

• dcount (delivery count): % of messages that arrived to destination
• aproc (average processes): average number of process instances (i.e., for a single process, the average number of devices running it)
• asiz (average size)
• mmsiz (max message size)
• adel (average delay)

See also the namespace tag in file lib/generals.hpp (where, e.g., struct max_msg_size turns into extracted metric mmsize).

Batch

./make.sh plots

Runs a huge number of experiments without GUI for each of the following scenarios:

• spherical topology
• tree topology
• tree topology exploiting Bloom filters

The resulting PDF plots will be produced in the plot/ directory.

For parameters and metrics see the previous section.

Case Study

./make.sh gui run -O -DGRAPHIC [-DBLOOM] case_study

The optional BLOOM parameter enables Bloom filters.

The essence of the Case Study (target case_study) consists of the following scenario, based on a network of nodes:

• when idle, a node n may decide to broadcast a discovery message for a service S
• each node m offering service S replies with an offer (each node in the network implements exactly one service taken from a set {S1, ..., Sk})
• if node n does not receive an offer for service S within a given interval, its wait times out and it returns to an idle state
• the first offer received by n is accepted and an accept message is sent to its sender m; the other offers are ignored
• upon the acceptance of its offer, node m starts sending a file (sequence) of N data messages to node n, sending one message per round (currently N=1)
• after a given interval, the nodes whose offers are ignored time out and return to an idle state
• after sending the last (only) message, m returns to an idle state
• after recognizing that it has received the last message, n returns to an idle state

Overall, the above steps are summarized by the following state machine:

Configuration

The case study can be configured through many settings:

• basic settings in case_study.cpp. These settings are the ones that are varied in the systematic tests.
  • dens density of the network as avg number of neighbours
  • hops network diameter
  • speed maximum speed of devices as a percentage of the communication speed
  • tvar variance of the round durations, as a percentage of the avg
• further settings in simulation_setup.hpp. These settings are shared with the targets graphic and batch of the systematic tests.
  • period avg duration of a round
  • comm communication radius
  • end end of simulated time
  • timeout_coeff coefficient to be multiplied to hops to get the timeout value
  • max_svc_id number k of different services {S1,...,Sk}
  • max_file_size maximum size (in messages) of the file sent by service to client (currently ignored since file size is fixed to 1)

Restrictions

The following are current restrictions to the scenario that may be lifted in future versions.

• at any round, each device is in exactly one of the poassible states IDLE, DISCO, OFFER, SERVED, SERVING of the above state machine. This means that a device that is, e.g., OFFER-ing its service cannot at the same being SERVING some previous request, etc.
• only one discovery message is actually generated during the whole use case execution. The request is created by the device with id (N-1) (where N is the number of devices) at time (round) T=11 (this delay has the purpose to let the tree topology computation stabilize)
• the offer accepted is always the first one received by a device in the DISCO state; in case two or more offers are received at the same time by a device in DISCO state, one of them is arbitrarily chosen to be accepted
• the file sent by a service after its offer has been accepted has a length of exactly 1 message