A Runtime Framework for Energy Efficient HPC Systems Without a Priori Knowledge of Applications

Ghislain Landry Tsafack Chetsa (1, 2) , Laurent Lefèvre (3, 1) , Jean-Marc Pierson (4, 5) , Patricia Stolf (4, 6) , Georges da Costa (4, 5)

1 ENS de Lyon - École normale supérieure de Lyon
2 AVALON - Algorithms and Software Architectures for Distributed and HPC Platforms
3 LIP - Laboratoire de l'Informatique du Parallélisme
4 IRIT-SEPIA - Système d’exploitation, systèmes répartis, de l’intergiciel à l’architecture
5 UT3 - Université Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier
6 UT2J - Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès

The rising computing demands of scientific endeavours often require the creation and management of High Performance Computing (HPC) systems for running experiments and processing vast amounts of data. These HPC systems generally operate at peak performance, consuming a large quantity of electricity, even though their workload varies over time. Understanding the behavioural patterns i.e., phases) of HPC systems during their use is key to adjust performance to resource demand and hence improve the energy efficiency. In this paper, we describe (i) a method to detect phases of an HPC system based on its workload, and (ii) a partial phase recognition technique that works cooperatively with on-the-fly dynamic management. We implement a prototype that guides the use of energy saving capabilities to demonstrate the benefits of our approach. Experimental results reveal the effectiveness of the phase detection method under real-life workload and benchmarks. A comparison with baseline unmanaged execution shows that the partial phase recognition technique saves up to 15% of energy with less than 1% performance degradation.

Mots clés: energy efficiency; green leverage; phase recognition; execution vector

Domaines: Calcul parallèle, distribué et partagé [cs.DC]

Ghislain Landry Tsafack Chetsa, Laurent Lefèvre, Jean-Marc Pierson, Patricia Stolf, Georges da Costa. A Runtime Framework for Energy Efficient HPC Systems Without a Priori Knowledge of Applications. 18th International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems (ICPAD 2012), Nov 2012, Singapour, Singapore. pp.660-667, ⟨10.1109/ICPADS.2012.94⟩. ⟨hal-00793685⟩