7,141 research outputs found
Checkpointing as a Service in Heterogeneous Cloud Environments
A non-invasive, cloud-agnostic approach is demonstrated for extending
existing cloud platforms to include checkpoint-restart capability. Most cloud
platforms currently rely on each application to provide its own fault
tolerance. A uniform mechanism within the cloud itself serves two purposes: (a)
direct support for long-running jobs, which would otherwise require a custom
fault-tolerant mechanism for each application; and (b) the administrative
capability to manage an over-subscribed cloud by temporarily swapping out jobs
when higher priority jobs arrive. An advantage of this uniform approach is that
it also supports parallel and distributed computations, over both TCP and
InfiniBand, thus allowing traditional HPC applications to take advantage of an
existing cloud infrastructure. Additionally, an integrated health-monitoring
mechanism detects when long-running jobs either fail or incur exceptionally low
performance, perhaps due to resource starvation, and proactively suspends the
job. The cloud-agnostic feature is demonstrated by applying the implementation
to two very different cloud platforms: Snooze and OpenStack. The use of a
cloud-agnostic architecture also enables, for the first time, migration of
applications from one cloud platform to another.Comment: 20 pages, 11 figures, appears in CCGrid, 201
GHOST: Building blocks for high performance sparse linear algebra on heterogeneous systems
While many of the architectural details of future exascale-class high
performance computer systems are still a matter of intense research, there
appears to be a general consensus that they will be strongly heterogeneous,
featuring "standard" as well as "accelerated" resources. Today, such resources
are available as multicore processors, graphics processing units (GPUs), and
other accelerators such as the Intel Xeon Phi. Any software infrastructure that
claims usefulness for such environments must be able to meet their inherent
challenges: massive multi-level parallelism, topology, asynchronicity, and
abstraction. The "General, Hybrid, and Optimized Sparse Toolkit" (GHOST) is a
collection of building blocks that targets algorithms dealing with sparse
matrix representations on current and future large-scale systems. It implements
the "MPI+X" paradigm, has a pure C interface, and provides hybrid-parallel
numerical kernels, intelligent resource management, and truly heterogeneous
parallelism for multicore CPUs, Nvidia GPUs, and the Intel Xeon Phi. We
describe the details of its design with respect to the challenges posed by
modern heterogeneous supercomputers and recent algorithmic developments.
Implementation details which are indispensable for achieving high efficiency
are pointed out and their necessity is justified by performance measurements or
predictions based on performance models. The library code and several
applications are available as open source. We also provide instructions on how
to make use of GHOST in existing software packages, together with a case study
which demonstrates the applicability and performance of GHOST as a component
within a larger software stack.Comment: 32 pages, 11 figure
Next Generation Cloud Computing: New Trends and Research Directions
The landscape of cloud computing has significantly changed over the last
decade. Not only have more providers and service offerings crowded the space,
but also cloud infrastructure that was traditionally limited to single provider
data centers is now evolving. In this paper, we firstly discuss the changing
cloud infrastructure and consider the use of infrastructure from multiple
providers and the benefit of decentralising computing away from data centers.
These trends have resulted in the need for a variety of new computing
architectures that will be offered by future cloud infrastructure. These
architectures are anticipated to impact areas, such as connecting people and
devices, data-intensive computing, the service space and self-learning systems.
Finally, we lay out a roadmap of challenges that will need to be addressed for
realising the potential of next generation cloud systems.Comment: Accepted to Future Generation Computer Systems, 07 September 201
Resource Management in Message Passing Environments
This paper discusses the need for resource management support for parallel applications running on workstation clusters and communicating by message passing among tasks. Many resource management systems are only able to start a message passing runtime environment and parallel applications, but dynamic reconfiguration fails because of the missing cooperation between the resource manager and the runtime environment. In order to utilize computational resources in message passing environments efficiently, to control execution of parallel applications by rescheduling tasks at runtime, and to minimize their execution time, a resource management system has been developed and preliminary tests results have been carried out. Most of our efforts in this regard have been to design an efficient approach to load measurement and process scheduling and implement the resource management system in a manner such that it can easily be adapted to any message passing framework. Although our first version is based on the PVM system, we also intend to implement an MPI â based resource management system
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