Huizu Between Religious Control and Freedom in Communist China: A Study of Chinese Muslim Minority

The freedom of religion in communist China is an ambiguous notion as the communist party understands religion as a reminiscent of backwardness and simultaneously proclaims the freedom of religion in the country. Islam, religion practiced by Hui minority, is included among the recognized religions of China and its adherents are granted rights to follow it. This paper argues that the Communist party has employed a disguised policy of controlling religious belief through establishing state controlled religious organizations and imparting freedom to practice religion. The slow and steady mind-making through these institutions train Hui youth to withdraw from their religion and to facilitate this withdrawal, the previously extant correlation between Hui ethnicity and religion (Islam) has been eliminated by the state and Hui ethnicity has nothing to do with religious affiliation anymore. The data for this research has been collected through ethnographic research upon the Hui community of Xi’an, employing unobtrusive observation as well as intensive interviewing.

Resilient Network Load Balancing for Datacenters

Datacenters (DCs) provide the backbone for online services such as web search and social networks. To deliver high bandwidth to such services, modern datacenters are often structured as multi-rooted tree topologies, resulting in multiple paths between every pair of servers. To optimally utilize the available bandwidth, an efficient network load balancing scheme is a critical component. Studies show that datacenters are prone to link failures and switch malfunctions, and this results in congestion asymmetry across network paths. ECMP is a widely deployed load balancing scheme in switches today, which hashes each flow onto one specific path. This leads to hash collisions for elephant flows. On the other side of the spectrum, some schemes spray packets across multiple paths, and while theirperformanceisnear-optimalundersymmetricconditions, theirperformancedegrades significantly under asymmetry, due to packet reordering. In this thesis, we explore how per-packet load balancing can be made efficient in the presence of asymmetry. Thekeycontributionofthisthesisisthedevelopmentofper-packet datacenternetwork load balancing schemes that perform well under asymmetry. Our work is based on the observation that if each flow is provided with a topology that exhibits symmetry in congestion across all its paths, then the flow is able to fully benefit from the bisection bandwidth without facing packet reordering. To this end, we propose SAPS, i.e., Symmetric and Adaptive Packet Spraying. SAPS leverages flow and group tables within OpenFlowenabled switches to create symmetric virtual topologies (SVTs), with each SVT consisting ofpathswithsimilarcapacity. SAPSmapseachflowtoaspecificSVT,withelephantflows mapped to larger bandwidth SVTs, and mice flows mapped probabilistically to any SVT. Experiments conducted involving large-scale packet-level simulations and real testbed settingsindicatethatSAPSimprovesupontheperformanceofseveralexistingloadbalancing schemessuchasECMPandweightedpacketspraying,undervariousfailurescenarios. Under certain scenarios, it also improves upon state-of-the-art schemes such as FlowBender and CONGA. OpenFlow-enabled switches provide the ability to rate limit groups of flows at the switch. By leveraging the rate limiting feature within OpenFlow-enabled switches, we canconstructanSVTbyextractingaspecificsymmetricchunk (orslice)ofresidualcapacity from various paths, rather than the all or nothing path inclusion mechanism in SAPS. 3 Whereas SAPS works well when asymmetry affects a few paths, its performance is adversely affected under higher levels of asymmetry. North-south traffic can lead to a greater number of paths being affected by asymmetry. Rate limiting enables the construction of a set of SVTs that contains the largest possible single SVT. We observe that under greater asymmetry, having an SVT set with the maximum possible SVT significantly enhances performance. This forms the basis of our proposed scheme, Slices, which outperforms other network load balancing schemes (including SAPS) when most paths face asymmetry. Both schemes (SAPS and Slices) are deployable on commonly available OpenFlowenabled switches