Re: [FRIAM] Charging agents for the computations they do
One thread that has run through much of Carl Hewitt's writing on Actors is the concept of a sponsor for a computation. This can be used to control things like execution of multiple independent solutions to the same problem so that alternatives can be terminated when any one of them finds a solution. It also could provide a basis for very fine-grained cost allocation. Carl's recent work on ActorScript, and technologies relating to privacy friendly cloud computing, may support something like what you want. I plan to include this kind of capability in my Organix/Humus system, but it's not really ready for commercial use. Contact me directly if you would be interested in having me work on a custom solution for you. On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 11:48 PM, Russ Abbott russ.abb...@gmail.com wrote: Thanks, Stephen. How come you only post announcements to Friam? About Google, they have an advantage over my situation. They can start and stop the clock when they start and stop the application. I don't know that I can do that for agents. Also, I have no control over whether something else runs while an agent's code is running. In a side conversation it occurred to me that this might be a good application for Aspect Oriented Programming. But it would still be more work than I was hoping to do. It's strange this hasn't been considered before. -- Russ On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 1:54 PM, Stephen Guerin stephen.gue...@redfish.com wrote: Hey Russ, You might look at how Google App Engine tries to get a handle on this when charging for CPU: http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/billing.html Josh has pointed out that there's some weird interpretations. For instance, they quote $0.10 per cpu hour but don't specify the CPU. Is it the canonical CPU at standard atmosphere? :-) Google google app engine calculating one cpu hour to see interesting corner cases. -S On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 12:56 PM, Gary Schiltz g...@naturesvisualarts.com wrote: Interesting idea. Most Common Lisp implementations compile to native machine code, so it might not be too hard to instrument the generated code to do some kind of bookeeping. There are quite a few open source implementations out there, e.g. Steel Bank Common Lisp (www.sbcl.org) or Clozure Common Lisp (trac.clozure.com/ccl). ;; Gary On Mar 7, 2011, at 12:38 PM, Russ Abbott wrote: I'm considering the development of an ABM in which the agents are charged for the computations they do. But I can't think of a language that facilitates that. I know that in most languages one can look at the real-time clock, but I can't think of a language in which one can look at a dynamic count of (virtual) instructions executed -- or even an dynamic measure of the amount of CPU time devoted to executing the instructions of each agent. Am I missing something obvious? Can anyone help. Thanks. -- Russ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org -- --- -. . ..-. .. ... - .-- --- ..-. .. ... stephen.gue...@redfish.com 624 Agua Fria, Santa Fe, NM 87501 office: 505.995.0206 mobile: 505.577.5828 redfish.com | sfcomplex.org | simtable.com | ambientpixel.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Charging agents for the computations they do
The Linux C library (probably most *nixes) has a time() function that can return, amongst others, the actual time that the CPU dedicated to the calling process, as opposed to simple elapsed time. Unfortunately, I don't think it can be made to report on thread level, which is probably what you'd like. For what it's worth: http://linux.die.net/man/2/times There is an associated shell command that can report the same information: http://linux.die.net/man/1/time Related: http://linux.die.net/man/2/getrusage I'm almost certain the Win32 API does not support anything similar. Rikus On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 19:38, Russ Abbott russ.abb...@gmail.com wrote: I'm considering the development of an ABM in which the agents are charged for the computations they do. But I can't think of a language that facilitates that. I know that in most languages one can look at the real-time clock, but I can't think of a language in which one can look at a dynamic count of (virtual) instructions executed -- or even an dynamic measure of the amount of CPU time devoted to executing the instructions of each agent. Am I missing something obvious? Can anyone help. Thanks. *-- Russ* FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Charging agents for the computations they do
Russ: could you say more about the ABM? Is it distributed? Cloud (AWS or GAE)? What language? GIS/Location Aware? Browser capable? Graphically intense (i.e. openGL/GLES/webgl or vanilla 2D)? GPU based? Scale (single system or cluster; how many agents)? .. and about another billion possibilities! Environment will have a lot to do with the cost strategy. One ABM approach we use on projects here is to sketch in NetLogo to get the basics down, then for a fairly useful performance gain, move on to Processing. This gives us roughly 100,000+ agents fairly easily. Then on to specialized systems depending on needs. We also combine systems, for example do runs in NetLogo, possibly headless, and then output the run to a 3D display environment. Doug Roberts can pipe in on really large scale, clustered systems. We are looking into a new architecture that uses tiny servers built on Node.js scattered world wide using backbone networking. For example, we measured Google-Amazon-Joyent communication to be 50Mb/s (all are in a NOC: Network Operations Center or have high bandwidth access to it.) For a bit extra, we can get over 100Mb/s but its not a standard feature yet. -- Owen On Mar 8, 2011, at 9:40 AM, Rikus Combrinck wrote: The Linux C library (probably most *nixes) has a time() function that can return, amongst others, the actual time that the CPU dedicated to the calling process, as opposed to simple elapsed time. Unfortunately, I don't think it can be made to report on thread level, which is probably what you'd like. For what it's worth: http://linux.die.net/man/2/times There is an associated shell command that can report the same information: http://linux.die.net/man/1/time Related: http://linux.die.net/man/2/getrusage I'm almost certain the Win32 API does not support anything similar. Rikus On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 19:38, Russ Abbott russ.abb...@gmail.com wrote: I'm considering the development of an ABM in which the agents are charged for the computations they do. But I can't think of a language that facilitates that. I know that in most languages one can look at the real-time clock, but I can't think of a language in which one can look at a dynamic count of (virtual) instructions executed -- or even an dynamic measure of the amount of CPU time devoted to executing the instructions of each agent. Am I missing something obvious? Can anyone help. Thanks. -- Russ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Charging agents for the computations they do
On Tue, Mar 08, 2011 at 06:40:16PM +0200, Rikus Combrinck wrote: The Linux C library (probably most *nixes) has a time() function that can return, amongst others, the actual time that the CPU dedicated to the calling process, as opposed to simple elapsed time. Unfortunately, I don't think it can be made to report on thread level, which is probably what you'd like. For what it's worth: http://linux.die.net/man/2/times There is an associated shell command that can report the same information: http://linux.die.net/man/1/time Related: http://linux.die.net/man/2/getrusage I'm almost certain the Win32 API does not support anything similar. Rikus Yes it does, although in typical Microsoft fashion, the details differ: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms683223(v=vs.85).aspx (I had cause to look into this recently :). Also my jellyfish model distributed with the EcoLab library is a case of using times to weight the agents by how much CPU time they consume. Unfortunately for the OP, this used a distributed memory message passing model for parallelism, so it worked in this case. I can't see how to get CPU time reporting at the thread level. Cheers -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Mathematics UNSW SYDNEY 2052 hpco...@hpcoders.com.au Australiahttp://www.hpcoders.com.au FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Charging agents for the computations they do
Thanks, that's good to know! --Rikus On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 23:22, Russell Standish r.stand...@unsw.edu.auwrote: Yes it does, although in typical Microsoft fashion, the details differ: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms683223(v=vs.85).aspx (I had cause to look into this recently :). FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
[FRIAM] Charging agents for the computations they do
I'm considering the development of an ABM in which the agents are charged for the computations they do. But I can't think of a language that facilitates that. I know that in most languages one can look at the real-time clock, but I can't think of a language in which one can look at a dynamic count of (virtual) instructions executed -- or even an dynamic measure of the amount of CPU time devoted to executing the instructions of each agent. Am I missing something obvious? Can anyone help. Thanks. *-- Russ* On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 5:42 AM, Dale Schumacher dale.schumac...@gmail.comwrote: Parsing Expression Grammars, part 2 (http://bit.ly/gDrbmi) goes beyond simple matching with semantic values, predicates and actions. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Charging agents for the computations they do
Interesting idea. Most Common Lisp implementations compile to native machine code, so it might not be too hard to instrument the generated code to do some kind of bookeeping. There are quite a few open source implementations out there, e.g. Steel Bank Common Lisp (www.sbcl.org) or Clozure Common Lisp (trac.clozure.com/ccl). ;; Gary On Mar 7, 2011, at 12:38 PM, Russ Abbott wrote: I'm considering the development of an ABM in which the agents are charged for the computations they do. But I can't think of a language that facilitates that. I know that in most languages one can look at the real-time clock, but I can't think of a language in which one can look at a dynamic count of (virtual) instructions executed -- or even an dynamic measure of the amount of CPU time devoted to executing the instructions of each agent. Am I missing something obvious? Can anyone help. Thanks. -- Russ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Charging agents for the computations they do
Hey Russ, You might look at how Google App Engine tries to get a handle on this when charging for CPU: http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/billing.html Josh has pointed out that there's some weird interpretations. For instance, they quote $0.10 per cpu hour but don't specify the CPU. Is it the canonical CPU at standard atmosphere? :-) Google google app engine calculating one cpu hour to see interesting corner cases. -S On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 12:56 PM, Gary Schiltz g...@naturesvisualarts.com wrote: Interesting idea. Most Common Lisp implementations compile to native machine code, so it might not be too hard to instrument the generated code to do some kind of bookeeping. There are quite a few open source implementations out there, e.g. Steel Bank Common Lisp (www.sbcl.org) or Clozure Common Lisp (trac.clozure.com/ccl). ;; Gary On Mar 7, 2011, at 12:38 PM, Russ Abbott wrote: I'm considering the development of an ABM in which the agents are charged for the computations they do. But I can't think of a language that facilitates that. I know that in most languages one can look at the real-time clock, but I can't think of a language in which one can look at a dynamic count of (virtual) instructions executed -- or even an dynamic measure of the amount of CPU time devoted to executing the instructions of each agent. Am I missing something obvious? Can anyone help. Thanks. -- Russ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org -- --- -. . ..-. .. ... - .-- --- ..-. .. ... stephen.gue...@redfish.com 624 Agua Fria, Santa Fe, NM 87501 office: 505.995.0206 mobile: 505.577.5828 redfish.com | sfcomplex.org | simtable.com | ambientpixel.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Charging agents for the computations they do
Thanks, Stephen. How come you only post announcements to Friam? About Google, they have an advantage over my situation. They can start and stop the clock when they start and stop the application. I don't know that I can do that for agents. Also, I have no control over whether something else runs while an agent's code is running. In a side conversation it occurred to me that this might be a good application for Aspect Oriented Programming. But it would still be more work than I was hoping to do. It's strange this hasn't been considered before. *-- Russ * On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 1:54 PM, Stephen Guerin stephen.gue...@redfish.comwrote: Hey Russ, You might look at how Google App Engine tries to get a handle on this when charging for CPU: http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/billing.html Josh has pointed out that there's some weird interpretations. For instance, they quote $0.10 per cpu hour but don't specify the CPU. Is it the canonical CPU at standard atmosphere? :-) Google google app engine calculating one cpu hour to see interesting corner cases. -S On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 12:56 PM, Gary Schiltz g...@naturesvisualarts.com wrote: Interesting idea. Most Common Lisp implementations compile to native machine code, so it might not be too hard to instrument the generated code to do some kind of bookeeping. There are quite a few open source implementations out there, e.g. Steel Bank Common Lisp (www.sbcl.org) or Clozure Common Lisp (trac.clozure.com/ccl). ;; Gary On Mar 7, 2011, at 12:38 PM, Russ Abbott wrote: I'm considering the development of an ABM in which the agents are charged for the computations they do. But I can't think of a language that facilitates that. I know that in most languages one can look at the real-time clock, but I can't think of a language in which one can look at a dynamic count of (virtual) instructions executed -- or even an dynamic measure of the amount of CPU time devoted to executing the instructions of each agent. Am I missing something obvious? Can anyone help. Thanks. -- Russ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org -- --- -. . ..-. .. ... - .-- --- ..-. .. ... stephen.gue...@redfish.com 624 Agua Fria, Santa Fe, NM 87501 office: 505.995.0206 mobile: 505.577.5828 redfish.com | sfcomplex.org | simtable.com | ambientpixel.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
