EECluster: An Energy-Efficient Tool for managing HPC Clusters

High Performance Computing clusters have become a very important element in research, academic and industrial communities because they are an excellent platform for solving a wide range of problems through parallel and distributed applications. Nevertheless, this high performance comes at the price of consuming large amounts of energy, which combined with notably increasing electricity prices are having an important economical impact, driving up power and cooling costs and forcing IT companies to reduce operation costs. To reduce the high energy consumptions of HPC clusters we propose a tool, named EECluster, for managing the energy-efficient allocation of the cluster resources, that works with both OGE/SGE and PBS/TORQUE Resource Management Systems (RMS) and whose decision-making mechanism is tuned automatically in a machine learning approach. Experimental studies have been made using actual workloads from the Scientific Modelling Cluster at Oviedo University and the academic-cluster used by the Oviedo University for teaching high performance computing subjects to evaluate the results obtained with the adoption of this too

EECluster: An Energy-Efficient Tool for managing HPC Clusters

High Performance Computing clusters have become a very important element in research, academic and industrial communities because they are an excellent platform for solving a wide range of problems through parallel and distributed applications. Nevertheless, this high performance comes at the price of consuming large amounts of energy, which combined with notably increasing electricity prices are having an important economical impact, driving up power and cooling costs and forcing IT companies to reduce operation costs. To reduce the high energy consumptions of HPC clusters we propose a tool, named EECluster, for managing the energy-efficient allocation of the cluster resources, that works with both OGE/SGE and PBS/TORQUE Resource Management Systems (RMS) and whose decision-making mechanism is tuned automatically in a machine learning approach. Experimental studies have been made using actual workloads from the Scientific Modelling Cluster at Oviedo University and the academic-cluster used by the Oviedo University for teaching high performance computing subjects to evaluate the results obtained with the adoption of this tool

Straggler Root-Cause and Impact Analysis for Massive-scale Virtualized Cloud Datacenters

Increased complexity and scale of virtualized distributed systems has resulted in the manifestation of emergent phenomena substantially affecting overall system performance. This phenomena is known as “Long Tail”, whereby a small proportion of task stragglers significantly impede job completion time. While work focuses on straggler detection and mitigation, there is limited work that empirically studies straggler root-cause and quantifies its impact upon system operation. Such analysis is critical to ascertain in-depth knowledge of straggler occurrence for focusing developmental and research efforts towards solving the Long Tail challenge. This paper provides an empirical analysis of straggler root-cause within virtualized Cloud datacenters; we analyze two large-scale production systems to quantify the frequency and impact stragglers impose, and propose a method for conducting root-cause analysis. Results demonstrate approximately 5% of task stragglers impact 50% of total jobs for batch processes, and 53% of stragglers occur due to high server resource utilization. We leverage these findings to propose a method for extreme straggler detection through a combination of offline execution patterns modeling and online analytic agents to monitor tasks at runtime. Experiments show the approach is capable of detecting stragglers less than 11% into their execution lifecycle with 95% accuracy for short duration jobs

Modern computing: Vision and challenges

Over the past six decades, the computing systems field has experienced significant transformations, profoundly impacting society with transformational developments, such as the Internet and the commodification of computing. Underpinned by technological advancements, computer systems, far from being static, have been continuously evolving and adapting to cover multifaceted societal niches. This has led to new paradigms such as cloud, fog, edge computing, and the Internet of Things (IoT), which offer fresh economic and creative opportunities. Nevertheless, this rapid change poses complex research challenges, especially in maximizing potential and enhancing functionality. As such, to maintain an economical level of performance that meets ever-tighter requirements, one must understand the drivers of new model emergence and expansion, and how contemporary challenges differ from past ones. To that end, this article investigates and assesses the factors influencing the evolution of computing systems, covering established systems and architectures as well as newer developments, such as serverless computing, quantum computing, and on-device AI on edge devices. Trends emerge when one traces technological trajectory, which includes the rapid obsolescence of frameworks due to business and technical constraints, a move towards specialized systems and models, and varying approaches to centralized and decentralized control. This comprehensive review of modern computing systems looks ahead to the future of research in the field, highlighting key challenges and emerging trends, and underscoring their importance in cost-effectively driving technological progress

Resource Allocation in Networking and Computing Systems: A Security and Dependability Perspective

In recent years, there has been a trend to integrate networking and computing systems, whose management is getting increasingly complex. Resource allocation is one of the crucial aspects of managing such systems and is affected by this increased complexity. Resource allocation strategies aim to effectively maximize performance, system utilization, and profit by considering virtualization technologies, heterogeneous resources, context awareness, and other features. In such complex scenario, security and dependability are vital concerns that need to be considered in future computing and networking systems in order to provide the future advanced services, such as mission-critical applications. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of existing literature that considers security and dependability for resource allocation in computing and networking systems. The current research works are categorized by considering the allocated type of resources for different technologies, scenarios, issues, attributes, and solutions. The paper presents the research works on resource allocation that includes security and dependability, both singularly and jointly. The future research directions on resource allocation are also discussed. The paper shows how there are only a few works that, even singularly, consider security and dependability in resource allocation in the future computing and networking systems and highlights the importance of jointly considering security and dependability and the need for intelligent, adaptive and robust solutions. This paper aims to help the researchers effectively consider security and dependability in future networking and computing systems.publishedVersio