Exploring interconnect energy savings under East-West traffic pattern of MapReduce clusters

An important challenge of modern data centers is to reduce energy consumption, of which a substantial proportion is due to the network. Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) is a recent standard that aims to reduce network power consumption, but current practice is to disable it in production use, since it has a poorly understood impact on real world application performance. An important application framework commonly used in modern data centers is Apache Hadoop, which implements the MapReduce programming model. This paper is the first to analyse the impact of EEE on MapReduce workloads, in terms of performance overheads and energy savings. We find that optimum energy savings are possible if the links use packet coalescing. Packet coalescing must, however, be carefully configured in order to avoid excessive performance degradation.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under grant agreement number 610456 (Euroserver). The research was also supported by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of Spain under the contract TIN2012-34557, HiPEAC-3 Network of Excellence (ICT-287759), and the Severo Ochoa Program (SEV-2011-00067) of the Spanish Government.Postprint (author's final draft

Energy Efficient Ethernet on MapReduce Clusters: Packet Coalescing To Improve 10GbE Links

An important challenge of modern data centers is to reduce energy consumption, of which a substantial proportion is due to the network. Switches and NICs supporting the recent energy efficient Ethernet (EEE) standard are now available, but current practice is to disable EEE in production use, since its effect on real world application performance is poorly understood. This paper contributes to this discussion by analyzing the impact of EEE on MapReduce workloads, in terms of performance overheads and energy savings. MapReduce is the central programming model of Apache Hadoop, one of the most widely used application frameworks in modern data centers. We find that, while 1GbE links (edge links) achieve good energy savings using the standard EEE implementation, optimum energy savings in the 10 GbE links (aggregation and core links) are only possible, if these links employ packet coalescing. Packet coalescing must, however, be carefully configured in order to avoid excessive performance degradation. With our new analysis of how the static parameters of packet coalescing perform under different cluster loads, we were able to cover both idle and heavy load periods that can exist on this type of environment. Finally, we evaluate our recommendation for packet coalescing for 10 GbE links using the energy-delay metric. This paper is an extension of our previous work [1], which was published in the Proceedings of the 40th Annual IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN 2015).This work was supported in part by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under Grant 610456 (EUROSERVER), in part by the Spanish Government through the Severo Ochoa programme (SEV-2011-00067 and SEV-2015-0493), in part by the Spanish Ministry of Economy a nd Competitiveness under Contract TIN2012-34557 and Contract TIN2015-65316-P, and in part by the Generalitat de Catalunya under Contract 2014-SGR-1051 and Contract 2014-SGR-1272.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Analyzing Performance Improvements and Energy Savings in Infiniband Architecture using Network Compression

One of the greatest challenges in HPC is total system power and energy consumption. Whereas HPC interconnects have traditionally been designed with a focus on bandwidth and latency, there is an increasing interest in minimising the interconnect\u27s energy consumption. This paper complements ongoing efforts related to power reduction and energy proportionality, by investigating the potential benefits from MPI data compression. We apply lossy compression to two common communication patterns in HPC kernels, in conjunction with recently introduced InfiniBand (IB) power saving modes. The results for the Alya CG kernel and Gromacs PME solver kernels show improvements in both performance and energy. While performance improvements are strongly influenced and changable depending on the type of communication pattern, energy savings in IB links are more consistent and proportional to achievable compression rates. We estimated an upper bound for link energy savings of up to 71% for the ALYA CG kernel, while for the Gromacs PME solver we obtained savings up to 63% compared to nominal energy when compression rate of 50% is used. We conclude that lossy compression is not always useful for performance improvements, but that it does reduce average IB link energy consumptio

Analyzing performance improvements and energy savings in Infiniband architecture using network compression

One of the greatest challenges in HPC is total system power and energy consumption. Whereas HPC interconnects have traditionally been designed with a focus on bandwidth and latency, there is an increasing interest in minimising the interconnect's energy consumption. This paper complements ongoing efforts related to power reduction and energy proportionality, by investigating the potential benefits from MPI data compression. We apply lossy compression to two common communication patterns in HPC kernels, in conjunction with recently introduced InfiniBand (IB) power saving modes. The results for the Alya CG kernel and Gromacs PME solver kernels show improvements in both performance and energy. While performance improvements are strongly influenced and changable depending on the type of communication pattern, energy savings in IB links are more consistent and proportional to achievable compression rates. We estimated an upper bound for link energy savings of up to 71% for the ALYA CG kernel, while for the Gromacs PME solver we obtained savings up to 63% compared to nominal energy when compression rate of 50% is used. We conclude that lossy compression is not always useful for performance improvements, but that it does reduce average IB link energy consumption