226 research outputs found
Evaluation of Docker Containers for Scientific Workloads in the Cloud
The HPC community is actively researching and evaluating tools to support
execution of scientific applications in cloud-based environments. Among the
various technologies, containers have recently gained importance as they have
significantly better performance compared to full-scale virtualization, support
for microservices and DevOps, and work seamlessly with workflow and
orchestration tools. Docker is currently the leader in containerization
technology because it offers low overhead, flexibility, portability of
applications, and reproducibility. Singularity is another container solution
that is of interest as it is designed specifically for scientific applications.
It is important to conduct performance and feature analysis of the container
technologies to understand their applicability for each application and target
execution environment. This paper presents a (1) performance evaluation of
Docker and Singularity on bare metal nodes in the Chameleon cloud (2) mechanism
by which Docker containers can be mapped with InfiniBand hardware with RDMA
communication and (3) analysis of mapping elements of parallel workloads to the
containers for optimal resource management with container-ready orchestration
tools. Our experiments are targeted toward application developers so that they
can make informed decisions on choosing the container technologies and
approaches that are suitable for their HPC workloads on cloud infrastructure.
Our performance analysis shows that scientific workloads for both Docker and
Singularity based containers can achieve near-native performance. Singularity
is designed specifically for HPC workloads. However, Docker still has
advantages over Singularity for use in clouds as it provides overlay networking
and an intuitive way to run MPI applications with one container per rank for
fine-grained resources allocation
ALOJA: A benchmarking and predictive platform for big data performance analysis
The main goals of the ALOJA research project from BSC-MSR, are to explore and automate the characterization of cost-effectivenessof Big Data deployments. The development of the project over its first year, has resulted in a open source benchmarking platform, an online public repository of results with over 42,000 Hadoop job runs, and web-based analytic tools to gather insights about system's cost-performance1.
This article describes the evolution of the project's focus and research
lines from over a year of continuously benchmarking Hadoop under dif-
ferent configuration and deployments options, presents results, and dis
cusses the motivation both technical and market-based of such changes.
During this time, ALOJA's target has evolved from a previous low-level
profiling of Hadoop runtime, passing through extensive benchmarking
and evaluation of a large body of results via aggregation, to currently
leveraging Predictive Analytics (PA) techniques. Modeling benchmark
executions allow us to estimate the results of new or untested configu-
rations or hardware set-ups automatically, by learning techniques from
past observations saving in benchmarking time and costs.This work is partially supported the BSC-Microsoft Research Centre, the Span-
ish Ministry of Education (TIN2012-34557), the MINECO Severo Ochoa Research program (SEV-2011-0067) and the Generalitat de Catalunya (2014-SGR-1051).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Performance characterization of containerization for HPC workloads on InfiniBand clusters: an empirical study
Containerization technology offers an appealing alternative for encapsulating and operating applications (and all their dependencies) without being constrained by the performance penalties of using Virtual Machines and, as a result, has got the interest of the High-Performance Computing (HPC) community to obtain fast, customized, portable, flexible, and reproducible deployments of their workloads. Previous work on this area has demonstrated that containerized HPC applications can exploit InfiniBand networks, but has ignored the potential of multi-container deployments which partition the processes that belong to each application into multiple containers in each host. Partitioning HPC applications has demonstrated to be useful when using virtual machines by constraining them to a single NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) domain. This paper conducts a systematical study on the performance of multi-container deployments with different network fabrics and protocols, focusing especially on Infiniband networks. We analyze the impact of container granularity and its potential to exploit processor and memory affinity to improve applications’ performance. Our results show that default Singularity can achieve near bare-metal performance but does not support fine-grain multi-container deployments. Docker and Singularity-instance have similar behavior in terms of the performance of deployment schemes with different container granularity and affinity. This behavior differs for the several network fabrics and protocols, and depends as well on the application communication patterns and the message size. Moreover, deployments on Infiniband are also more impacted by the computation and memory allocation, and because of that, they can exploit the affinity better.We thank Lenovo for providing the testbed to run the experiments in this paper. This work was partially supported by Lenovo as part of Lenovo-BSC collaboration agreement, by the Spanish Government under contract PID2019-107255GB-C22, and by the Generalitat de Catalunya under contract 2017-SGR-1414 and under Grant No. 2020 FI-B 00257.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version
A High-Performance Design, Implementation, Deployment, and Evaluation of The Slim Fly Network
Novel low-diameter network topologies such as Slim Fly (SF) offer significant
cost and power advantages over the established Fat Tree, Clos, or Dragonfly. To
spearhead the adoption of low-diameter networks, we design, implement, deploy,
and evaluate the first real-world SF installation. We focus on deployment,
management, and operational aspects of our test cluster with 200 servers and
carefully analyze performance. We demonstrate techniques for simple cabling and
cabling validation as well as a novel high-performance routing architecture for
InfiniBand-based low-diameter topologies. Our real-world benchmarks show SF's
strong performance for many modern workloads such as deep neural network
training, graph analytics, or linear algebra kernels. SF outperforms
non-blocking Fat Trees in scalability while offering comparable or better
performance and lower cost for large network sizes. Our work can facilitate
deploying SF while the associated (open-source) routing architecture is fully
portable and applicable to accelerate any low-diameter interconnect
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